LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

l^M^ — 

Slielf...C.7.F5 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
















TRecoUections of 



^^ort) ^otoit)ge 







trndianapolia anD IRansas Citb : 

The Bowen-Merrill Compy, Publishers^ 
Eighteen Ninety-Five. •■'} ,r/:c 




^*'Si'^S'J^SS^ Si*' Si'^Si*' SS^Si^Si*^ ffi^Si*- Si*Sl* ii*Si*\ 







Copyright, 1895, 

BY 

THE BOWEN-MERRILL CO. 



/t-32/p- 



TO 
THE HONORABLE JOHN M. HARLAN, 

ONE OF THE JUSTICES OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, 

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 

AS A MARK OF ESTEEM FOR HIS HIGH CHARACTER AND GREAT 

ABILITIES, AND OF GRATITUDE FOR HIS KINDNESS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Going to England in May, 1891, I was 
fortunate enough to have a letter from Mr. 
Justice Harlan, of the Supreme Court, intro- 
ducing me to Lord Coleridge. I delayed 
sending it for some days after getting to 
London, knowing that the courts and Parlia- 
ment were in session, and supposing that his 
duties on the Bench and in the House of 
Lords would occupy his Lordship's time so 
that he would have little leisure, if he had 
the inclination, to show me any attention. 
At last, however, I sent the letter by post 
with my card, and the next day received the 
following note from his Lordship : 

I Sussex Square, Hyde Park, W., 

9th July, 1 89 1. 

My Dear Sir — I have received with great interest 

Mr. Justice Harlan's note of introduction and I shall 

be extremely glad to be of any service to you in my 

(5) 



6 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

power. Any day next week except Saturday (and 
Saturday in this week) I shall be very happy to see 
you in my room and to give you a seat upon the Bench. 
Do you chance to be disengaged on Thursday, the 
i6th (this day week).? If you are and will come and 
dine here on that day at 8 o'clock it will give Lady 
Coleridge and me much pleasure. 

Your faithful servant, 

W. P. Fishback, Esq. Coleridge. 

I called on Monday at his Lordship's room 
in the Law Courts building, in the Strand, 
and found his secretary in waiting. That 
gentleman, a venerable-looking, mild-man- 
nered person, was seated in the anteroom at 
a table upon which there was a tray of goose- 
quill pens. As soon as his Lordship arrived, 
I was ushered into his presence. Lord Cole- 
ridge was very tall, six feet three inches, I 
should suppose, with an erect, stout, but not 
corpulent figure. He had a fine, large head, 
with a smooth, benignant face, a winning 
smile, and a voice gentle and well modulated. 
Since the first publication of this paper in June, 
1894, I have read some reminiscences of 
Lord Chief-Justice Coleridge, written by the 
present Lord Chief-Justice, Lord Russell of 
Killowen, which were published in the North 



LORD COLERIDGE. 7 

American Review, September, 1894. Lord 
Russell says that Lord Coleridge possessed 
"a voice, the beauty of which I have not 
often known surpassed. Indeed, if I except 
the voices perhaps of Sir Alexander Cock- 
burn, Mr. Gladstone, the present Sir Robert 
Peel, and the late Father Burke, of the Do- 
minican order, I shall have exhausted the 
list of those who may be said to have been 
his superiors in this respect. ' ' 

Lord Coleridge greeted me most cordially, 
and, while his secretary was getting the gown 
and wig, he said that when in the United States , 
in 1883, the people had almost spoiled him by 
their kindness. He spoke of our Presidents, 
and said it was a matter of amazement to him, 
when he considered our method of choosing a 
chief magistrate, that we were so uniformly fort- 
unate in selecting such able men. He spoke 
especially of President Arthur, upon whom 
he had made a call of courtesy at the White 
House. When he rose to leave, the Presi- 
dent said, " No, stay longer. I wish to have 
a chat with you ; you have no idea what a 
relief it is to have a visitor who is not after an 
office." He was delighted with Mr. Arthur, 



8 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

whom he found to be a reader of good books 
and full of interesting literary gossip. It was 
a shame, he thought, that the chief magis- 
trate of a republic of sixty million people 
should be compelled to waste so much time 
in settling disputes between claimants for 
office. 

During the talk Lord Coleridge's son Gil- 
bert came in, and he was full of cordiality 
and kindness. They both spoke of Secretary 
Blaine's ability as a diplomat, and were es- 
pecially complimentary in what they said of 
his then recent note to Baron Fava, concern- 
ing the New Orleans riot and the killing of 
members of the Mafia, I expressed the 
opinion then, which has since been confirmed, 
that the credit of that matter belonged to 
President Harrison, rather than to Mr. Blaine. 
It is hard for an Englishman to understand 
that the President is in the habit of taking a 
personal hand in the management of inter- 
national affairs; that he is his own Prime 
Minister, and that his Cabinet officers, whom 
he appoints and discharges at pleasure, are 
his under-secretaries. 

Speaking of the riot at New Orleans, Lord 



LORD COLERIDGE. 9 

Coleridge said that the respect for law which 
is ingrained in the Anglo-Saxon character 
sometimes yielded to the pressure of great 
emergencies ; that there were times when the 
swift methods of Judge Lynch became necessa- 
ry in a community where crime is influential 
and powerful enough to debauch or intimidate 
courts or juries. This language, from the 
Lord Chief-Justice of England, while he was 
assuming the wig and gown, surprised me. 
Lord Coleridge was Attorney-General in the 
Gladstone Ministry before he went upon the 
Bench, and will be remembered for the ability 
and success with which he prosecuted the 
Tichborne claimant. Speaking of Lord Cole- 
ridge's cross-examination of the Tichborne 
claimant Lord Russell says, in the reminis- 
cences from which I have already quoted, 
"For my ovm part, I thought it and still 
think it the best thing he ever did. It was not 
a cross-examination, calculated, nor should I 
think even intended, for immediate effect. It 
was not like the brilliant cross-examination of 
the witness Baigent by Mr. Hawkins (now 
Mr. Justice Hawkins), in which the observer 
could follow the point and object, question by 



10 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

question, but it was one, the full force and 
effect of which could only be appreciated 
when the facts, as they ultimately appeared 
in the defendant's case, were finally disclosed. 
When indeed the subsequent prosecution for 
perjury took place, it was then seen how thor- 
ough and searching that cross-examination had 
been ; how, in effect, if I may use a fox-hunt- 
ing metaphor, all the earths had been effectu- 
ally stopped." 

Lord Coleridge gave this incident in his par- 
liamentary career. A critical question was up 
one night, in the Commons, and it was feared 
that a division would come before the Liberals 
could be brought in from the clubs . Gladstone 
requested him to speak against time while the 
"whips" were out, and to talk nonsense, if 
nothing else, for an hour. He obeyed his chief 
and when his task was done Mr. Lowe took the 
floor and held it until the Government benches 
were full and the Government was safe. 

When the Secretary had adjusted the robe 
and wig, his Lordship asked me what I 
thought of the enormous tail to his gown. 
' ' This tail I am entitled to wear as a mark of 
distinction," said he, as he gathered it in his 



LORD COLERIDGE. ii 

hand and led the way to the court room, 
where he had an officer bring me a chair, 
which was placed beside him. The jury — a 
special London jury — was in the box. The 
oath was administered, the book kissed, and 
Sir Charles Russell rose and addressed the 
jury from an elaborate brief. The case was 
North vs. Stopes. It grew out of the sub- 
scription and sale of some corporation stock. 
"Sir Charles," said his Lordship to me, "is 
to-day the greatest lawyer at the English 
bar." He theii handed me a slip with the 
names of counsel — Sir Charles Russell, Q, 
C; Mr. Home Payne, Q. C, and Mr. Mc- 
Intyre, for plaintiff; Mr. Finlay, Q. C, Mr. 
Candy, Q. C, and Mr. Duke, for the defend- 
ant. The interests involved were large, and 
the jury was made up of business men of the 
best rank. Sir Charles's opening statement 
showed the most perfect familiarity with the 
case, and, before he had finished, it seemed 
certain that he would win. Sir Charles, at 
one time, manifested a little impatience or 
petulance, if that is not too strong a word, at 
the well-intentioned though mal apropos inter- 
ruption of his junior who twitched his gown to 



12 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

remind him of some point which he may have 
neglected to present. A quick backhanded 
gesture was the rather discourteous response 
he made to the proposed suggestion. I was 
surprised to see him leave the court room as 
soon as he was through, supposing that, be- 
ing senior counsel, he would conduct the ex- 
amination of the witnesses. I was informed, 
however, that courtesy required that the 
senior should absent himself while his junior 
examined the plaintiff, who was the first wit- 
ness. While this examination was in progress 
Sir Charles Russell could step across the hall 
and argue another case and earn a fat fee. 
But all of his fees were large, his annual in- 
come from his practice being, as I was in- 
formed, in excess of $200,000. He is cer- 
tainly a great lawyer, and has now succeeded 
Coleridge as Lord Chief-Justice. With his 
wig on. Sir Charles bears a resemblance to 
the portraits of Washington. He talks good 
American English, free from any trace of the 
New England or Southern peculiarities; free, 
also, from all signs of cockneyism or the 
fashionable hesitancy of speech so much 
affected by the peers and other English speak- 



LORD COLERIDGE. 13 

ers and a few Anglomaniacs in and about 
New York. 

While the plaintiff was testifying, the Chief- 
Justice took careful notes of the principal 
points, and when there was a pause to allow 
him to finish a sentence, instead of the ordi- 
nary " go on," or " proceed," he would say 
" yes," with a rising inflection, and the wit- 
ness would resume. The business went for- 
ward rapidly, but with perfect order and dig- 
nity. During the examination of Mr. North 
an incident occurred which caused some mer- 
riment and brought to mind the ludicrous 
story of Dickens's about the red-faced judge 
who presided at the trial of the case of Bar- 
dell vs. Pickwick, in which Mr. Winkle vainly 
tried to persuade the judge that his name 
was plain Nathaniel, instead of Daniel Na- 
thaniel, as the judge had it in his notes. In 
computing the number of shares of stock sub- 
scribed, the total was put at 1,715, divided 
between A, B and C. The Chief-Justice 
omitted one item, and his footing did not 
agree with that of the counsel; but, being 
down in the judge's notes, it was conclusive 
until one of the counsel came to the relief of 



14 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

the court and in a bland way pointed out the 
omission. 

I noticed during the progress of the case 
that when a paper was produced in evidence, 
it was not allowed to be read until a revenue 
officer in attendance inspected it to see if it re- 
quired a stamp, and if the proper stamp had 
been affixed and canceled. The rule for a 
time was that an unstamped instrument was 
absolutely void.* Now it is held that no 
right can be asserted under a paper requiring 
* a stamp until the stamp is affixed. Penalties 
are enforced for the willful omission to stamp 
a writing which the law requires to be 
stamped. After the plaintiff's examination 
was finished, there was an adjournment for 
half an hour for luncheon in the room of the 
Chief-Justice, where the standard English 
chops, peas, potatoes and claret were served. 
His Lordship, rising to go, said: "You 
will see now how soon I shall dispose of that 
case . It rests almost wholly upon the documen- 
tary proofs, introduced in connection with 



*Such was the rule in the courts of the United 
States when our revenue laws first required stamps to 
be affixed to deeds and other written instruments. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 15 

plaintiff's testimony, and the lawyers on both 
sides know what I am going to say to the jury." 
Just then there was a tap at the door, and a 
bailiff presented himself with a message, say- 
ing if his Lordship would wait a few minutes 
the case would be settled. Court convened 
soon after, and the jury was discharged, the 
judge saying to counsel, " Do not forget the 
honorarium, gentlemen." This honorarium 
was a guinea for each juror, the customary 
fee. His Lordship expressed the opinion 
that it would be better to adopt our system 
of paying jurors from the public treasury. 

He told me a story of a successful cross- 
examination of a rascal who was trying to 
prove a forged will. Lord Coleridge was 
a junior in the case, with Mr. Rowley, Q. C, 
senior. A man of fortune had bequeathed 
the bulk of his estate to a niece and a nephew. 
After his death a new will turned up, pur- 
porting to have been made at Bath, where 
the testator had gone a short time before 
his death. The scoundrel who had a hand 
in fabricating the will appeared as a wit- 
ness, and told a story of great plausibility 
about how the instructions were given by the 



i6 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

testator, and how he had followed these in- 
structions in preparing the will. Rowley, 
after working an hour or two, was discour- 
aged, and said to his junior, " How can I 
break that rascal down? He is lying and I 
know it, but he is imposing on the court and 
the jury," He resumed his questions, how- 
ever, and the witness began to fidget, and 
show signs of weakness ; he fumbled in his 
waistcoat pocket and pulled out a slip of 
paper, which he quickly put back after glanc- 
ing at it. Rowley caught him and said, 
"Let me have that paper." 

"No, I won't," said the witness. "I 
haven't used it, and you have no right 
to it." 

"Will you swear, sir," said the lawyer, 
' ' that it does not contain some memoranda 
pertaining to this case? " 

The fellow was confused, counsel on the 
other side protested, the jurors became curi- 
ous, and finally the paper was put in the 
hands of the cross-examiner. There were 
some words on it which did not seem to be 
coherent, but the wily lawyer, assuming to 
understand more than he really did, began to 



LORD COLERIDGE. 17 

prod the witness, who was soon freely per- 
spiring and in a high state of excitement. 
Counsel on the other side saw their case 
going to pieces, and arose and told the court 
they were satisfied that the witness was a liar 
and that the will was forged. 

I reminded him of the case mentioned by 
Frederick W. Robertson, of Brighton, which 
occurred at the Assizes, in which a rascal was 
on trial for cheating at cards. Prosecutor 
and witness had failed to discover the cheat's 
trick. Jervis, the presiding judge, took the 
pack of cards in his hand and gave them to 
the foreman of the jury to shuffle, saying he 
could pick out and name any card in the pack 
without facing them. He did it, and pointed 
out a marking which had escaped the notice 
of everybody till then. Lord Coleridge re- 
membered the case and said that Jervis had 
tried a card-sharp a few days before at another 
place, on the circuit, when he had acquired 
the knowledge that enabled him to detect the 
cheat. 

The will case reminds me of the success of 
Alexander Hamilton in cross-examining a 
witness named Croucher, who was testifying 



i8 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

against Hamilton's client, who was on trial 
for murder. It was dark and candles were 
brought into the court room. Before taking 
the witness in hand Hamilton placed a lighted 
candle on each side of the witness's face and 
asked the jury to look in the eyes of the wit- 
ness while he testified. Counsel on the other 
side protested, but Mr. Hamilton told the 
court that in a short time it would appear 
who the real murderer was. He then began 
his cross-examination, and it was not long 
before Croucher was utterly broken down and 
the prosecution abandoned the case. The 
witness fled to England, where he committed 
some other crime, for which he was executed. 
The ability to successfully conduct a cross- 
examination of an intelligent and prejudiced 
or rascally witness is rare. Some lawyers go 
at a witness as a savage goes at his enemy, 
with a knotted club, relying upon the mere 
brute force of browbeating. This method of 
attack is faulty in theory and usually results 
in disaster to the lawyer. Quiet self-posses- 
sion, patient perseverance, fairness to the wit- 
ness, quick perception, good temper, or at 
least no manifestation of ill-temper ; these are 



LORD COLERIDGE. 19 

the qualities which enable the great lawyer to 
expose one who is trying to palm off upon a 
jury a made-up story. 



20 RECOLLECTIONS OF 



CHAPTER II. 

The invitation to dine with Lady and Lord 
Coleridge was for 8 o'clock. Within five 
or ten minutes of the time named the guests 
were assembled, with the exception of the 
Lord Chancellor, who did not arrive until the 
others were seated. He explained that he 
was kept at the House of Lords, where there 
was a protracted discussion of the free edu- 
cation bill, the Duke of Argyll holding the 
floor till a late hour. Among others present 
there were Mr. Russell, whose sketch of Glad- 
stone had just been published; Mr. Harrison, 
a brother of Frederic Harrison; Mrs. Eleanor 
Woodehouse, daughter of Matthew Arnold, 
whose husband is a son of Earl Kimberly, 
formerly Irish Secretary in the Gladstone 
Ministry, and now a member of Lord Rose- 
bery's Cabinet; Mrs. Bigham, wife of Mr. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 21 

Bigham, Q. C, who stands with Sir Charles 
Russell in the front rank of England's great 
lawyers; Lady Denison, Miss Baring Law- 
ford, sister of Lady Coleridge, and others, 
whose names I do not recall. 

It might go without saying that a London 
dinner party of English ladies and gentlemen, 
made up by Lady and Lord Coleridge, would 
be fairly typical of the intellectual aristocracy 
as opposed to the horse-racing, prize-fighting 
and baccarat nobility, who have inherited 
social station instead of winning it. Schop- 
enauer was in the habit of dining at a caie 
which was much frequented by some scions 
of the English nobility. It was noticed that 
whenever the philosopher of pessimism took 
his seat he placed a gold piece on the corner 
of the table. After several days this conduct 
excited curiosity, and some one was bold 
enough to ask Schopenauer what it meant. 
"Why," said he, "I have made a wager with 
myself — that whenever I hear those young 
Englishmen over there talk on any subject but 
dogs, horses and women, I will give that 
money to some charitable institution. From 



22 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

what I have seen and heard, however, I ex- 
pect to keep my gold a long while." 

Well, Lady Coleridge's company did not 
indulge in that sort of talk. Here let me 
mention a bit of Philistinism which cropped 
out in a recent article on London society in 
one of our leading magazines. The article 
told of an American who was shocked at 
what he regarded as the ill-breeding of a Lon- 
don host or hostess at whose house he was 
an invited guest. He doubtless expected to 
have a jolly, effusive, hand-shaking and back- 
slapping reception, something of the pluto- 
cratic-cheerful-vulgarity style of New York. 
He was amazed, after threading his way 
through the lines of ushers into the drawing- 
room, to discover that he was left alone to 
make his way, as best he could in a strange 
company, without a formal introduction to 
the guests. So he made a wall flower of 
himself, and wrote himself down an ass in an 
ill-natured criticism of what is certainly one 
of the greatest charms of well-bred society. 
Persons invited to such a company are vouched 
for by the host and are expected to make 



LORD COLERIDGE. 23 

themselves agreeable to one another without 
preliminary introductions. 

You address the lady or gentleman who 
happens to be next to you at the table or in 
the drawing-room, with the freedom of an 
acquaintance. If the conversation which en- 
sues is agreeable, the chance meeting may 
lead to a familiar interchange of views, and 
may possibly ripen into a lasting friendship. 
This is immeasurably better than the awkward 
formality which debars conversation among 
guests who have not been "introduced." 
Surely, we may learn from others something 
of the social amenities and equities, and some 
of the small, sweet courtesies of life which 
are so essential to right living. 

Our amiable and candid critic, Mr. Mat- 
thew Arnold, gives us great praise. He 
says our institutions fit us like a well-made 
suit of clothes, our women are charming, we 
have successfully solved the political problem, 
we have solved the social problem also and 
have established the principle of equality, but 
he regrets to say that we have not solved the 
' ' human problem ' ' — there is a lack of ur- 
banity in the newspaper style of writing, a 



24 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

tendency toward the penny-dreadful manner, 
the flippant funny man is too much in evi- 
dence, there is something bordering on indeh- 
cacy in the way in which our leading news- 
papers discuss the private and family affairs 
of public men. When our editors tell us 
that all this is because our people like it and 
will have it so, it is an open confession that 
Mr. Arnold's criticism is just. Is it not quite 
likely that our blood kin of the tight little 
island have not been fooling away their time 
for a thousand years, and that they really 
know how to do some things quite as well as 
ourselves? 



LORD COLERIDGE. 25 



CHAPTER in. 

Seeing Matthew Arnold's daughter a guest 
at Lord Coleridge's recalled the remark attrib- 
uted to Lord Coleridge when Mr, Arnold was 
lecturing in America, that Mr. Arnold was 
the greatest living Englishman. I mentioned 
it to him, and he said that he had not used 
the word "greatest," but had called Mr. 
Arnold the most ' ' distinguished ' ' living 
Englishman, in the sense that he was unique 
and set apart from his countrymen by such 
marked peculiarities of style in prose and 
poetry, by his great scholarship, his broad 
sympathies, and his unerring and grateful ap- 
preciation of what was best in literature, an- 
cient and modern. Mr. Arnold and Lord 
Coleridge, the one from Rugby and the other 
from Eton, were fellow-students at Balliol 
College, Oxford. Mr. Justice Coleridge, 



26 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Lord Coleridge's father, was one of the most 
intimate friends of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, a 
fact which is well attested by the correspond- 
ence published in Dean Stanley's life of Dr. 
Arnold. When Dean Stanley was prepar- 
ing this life Mr. Justice Coleridge was re- 
quested by Mrs. Arnold to prepare and de- 
liver to her husband's biographer such 
recollections as he had of Arnold's career 
as an undergraduate at Oxford. He closes 
his sketch with these words : * ' Within the 
peaceful walls of Corpus I made friends, of 
whom all are spared me but Arnold — he has 
fallen asleep — but the bond there formed, 
which the lapse of years and our differing walks 
in life did not unloosen, and which strong 
opposition of opinions only rendered more in- 
timate, though interrupted in time I feel not 
to be broken — may I venture without unsea- 
sonable solemnity to express the firm trust 
that it will endure forever in eternity?" This 
bond of friendship was transmitted to their 
more distinguished sons. It was pleasant to 
hear Lord Coleridge speak feelingly and with 
generous praise of his dead friend. At the 
foot of the stairway in the Coleridge man- 



LORD COLERIDGE. 27 

sion was a fine bust of Matthew Arnold, a 
copy of one which has been placed in West- 
minster Abbey, Lord Coleridge being the 
orator who pronounced the panegyric at the 
public ceremony.* The two men were about 
the same age, and always addressed one an- 
other with the familiarity of boys. Arnold was 
always ' ' Matt ' ' to Coleridge. ' ' Was Mr. Ar- 
nold true to his teachings as the apostle of 
the gospel of sweetness and light ?" " Per- 
fectly and always," was Lord Coleridge's an- 
swer. He told me that Arnold's ideal of a 
happy home was realized in his cottage at 
Cobham, in Surrey, where his widow still re- 
sides. There were his family, his books and 
his dogs. He was forever weeding his library 
shelves and getting rid of cumbersome and 
useless stuff. 

He and Coleridge came under the spell of 
Newman's influence at Oxford, and the 
friendship there established was never broken 
or weakened by Newman's forsaking Angli- 
canism and going to Rome. "A most faith- 
ful likeness," as Lord Coleridge called it, of 
the Cardinal, made but a few months before 



*This address is published in full in the Appendix. 



28 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

his death, hung on the wall in Coleridge's 
library. It is a saintly face. Near it was a 
splendid likeness of his Lordship, made by 
his first wife, who was an accomplished ar- 
tist. In his poem on Rugby Chapel, Matthew 
Arnold speaks with triumphant faith, or shall 
I say hope, rather, of there being a place 
where "that strength, zealous, beneficent, 
firm," of his father shall find occupation with 
the immortals in ' ' the labor house vast of be- 
ing." And now he is of them also, with 
his father, and the two Coleridges, and New- 
man, and Professor Jowett, the master of 
Balliol, who went before Coleridge — the last 
one — only a few months ago. Of Prof. 
Jowett' s death Lord Coleridge wrote me in 
October, 1893, saying: " The death of the 
master of Balliol has hit me very hard. He 
was the best and almost the oldest of my sur- 
viving friends, and his death has made my 
world much poorer and much smaller. He 
was a really great man, a very good one, and 
one of the tenderest, most loyal and truest of 
friends." 



LORD COLERIDGE. 29 



CHAPTER IV. 

I WAS interested to know something of Mr. 
Arnold's daily life, and I count it no infrac- 
tion of the rules of hospitality or propriety to 
give some facts which I learned from Mrs. 
Woodehouse, at dinner that day. Her father 
was an incessant reader, and always read 
with pen in hand, making copious notes. He 
was an early riser, and worked in his library 
without refreshment until the breakfast 
hour at 9 o'clock. After breakfast he re- 
sumed his work, and continued it until 2 or 
3 o'clock, when he was ready for a long 
ramble of an hour or two, in company with 
his daughter, over the Surrey hills. He was 
a good shot, and kept dogs, which he always 
took with him in these excursions. 

When I had the honor of entertaining Mr. 
and Mrs. Arnold at Indianapolis, during his 



30 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

lecture tour in 1883, a partnership dog, 
owned or claimed by Myron Reed and me, 
presented himself at the hall door and insisted 
upon coming in with the guests. It was a 
sleety February day, and I was on the point 
of shutting the door against " John," but 
Mr. Arnold said, "Let John come in," as 
he stooped and patted him on the head. 
John recognized him by some sort of free- 
masonry, and seemed to understand that he 
was indebted to his new friend for the privi- 
lege of curling up on the rug that evening, in 
the midst of good company, instead of stay- 
ing in his lonesome kennel. 

John was a stray, and, so far as we could 
learn, an unregistered pointer, which had 
been abandoned by some pot-hunter who had 
worn him out during the shooting season. He 
was found in my outhouse, rheumatic and 
emaciated, and by virtue of starvation and ill 
treatment had become a pessimistic " tramp." 
At first he snarled when food was offered to 
him, but kindness brought him around at last, 
and in a few months he became a favorite 
with all the children in the neighborhood. 
If the night were cold he would leave his 



LORD COLERIDGE. 31 

kennel and cross the street to Reed's 
home, and if a Hght were burning in the 
preacher's Hbrary, John would give one 
peremptory knock at the door, and, being 
admitted, he would stretch himself before the 
fire, with his nose on his paws, and watch the 
preacher while he was writing one of his in- 
imitable sermons, or, if in the mood, reading 
the very latest novel. Reed said he always 
knew when our family had gone to bed by 
John's signal at his door. John went to 
Denver with the preacher and soon died. 

One of the most pathetic things I ever 
read was Reed's letter describing the last 
hours of our old friend and the sadness of the 
household at the time. He said he then re- 
solved he would have no more dogs about 
the house, but one day he came home and 
found his little daughter fondling an ill-fav- 
ored puppy with "a Websterian head, thick 
tail and enormous feet." He ordered it out 
of the house, but the child pleaded for her 
pet and said she had taken it from a boy who 
was about to "drown him in the cold -waXer ." 
That settled it, and puppy became a member 
of the family. If the dog is living yet you 



32 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

may be sure that he will stay by his friend 
Myron — call him what you will, Populist, 
Communist or Anarchist. It was Ouida, I 
think, who said that the more she saw of men 
the better she liked dogs. There is something 
lacking in the make-up of a man who does 
not take kindly to an affectionate dog. Reed 
told me once he doubted the power of divine 
grace to save one of the elect, a deacon of 
the Presbyterian Church, because he had 
poisoned two beautiful setters belonging to a 
neighbor just before going to prayer-meet- 
ing. 

I told Mrs. Woodehouse that her father's 
many friends would look with interest to the 
publication of a biography, but she answered 
that it would not be according to her father's 
wish if his life were written. He had seen so 
many caricatures under the guise of biog- 
raphies that he preferred to rest his claims for 
fame and usefulness on what he had written 
and published. It is strange to many that 
Mr. Arnold wrote very little poetry, during 
the last twenty years of his life, a period dur- 
ing which, in other lines of literary work, he 
was so productive. His family and friends 



LORD COLERIDGE. 33 

say that his standard was so high and his 
critical judgment so severe that he preferred 
to write none, rather than to produce what 
might be classed as unsound or inferior. He 
was not much of a letter writer, and was in 
the habit of using his daughter as his amanu- 
ensis. 

Notwithstanding Mr, Arnold's disinclina- 
tion to have his life written, it would surely 
be very grateful to the many and certainly 
increasing number of the admirers of his writ- 
ings to know as much as possible of the man 
who has exercised such a powerful formative 
influence upon the thought of the present 
generation. I have heard also that Mr. Ar- 
nold was in the habit of destroying letters 
written to him. In this he was like Sydney 
Smith, who wrote to the daughter of . Sir 
James Mackintosh, when she, in collecting 
materials for her father's biography, asked 
him for letters, that he had made it a rule to 
promptly destroy every letter he received 
from any human being. This was a great 
mistake. The world would know but one 
side, and that not always the best, of some of 
3 



34 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

its greatest men, were it not for the charming 
letters they wrote. Where is there more de- 
lightful reading than the letters of Cowper, 
Swift, Heine, Carlyle, Emerson, Motley, Dr. 
Arnold, and others that might be named? 
Even the old bear, Dr. Johnson, shows the 
velvet on his paws in the two volumes of his 
letters to Mrs. Thrale and others. 

When the ladies retired and the gentlemen 
gathered about their host at the top of the 
table, where the port was served, a remark of 
Lord Coleridge led to a conversation about 
the American judiciary. The Lord Chancel- 
lor looks upon the short tenures of our state 
judges and their election by a popular vote as 
an abomination, and in this he is probably in 
line with the current opinion among thought- 
ful Americans. 

There is something shocking in the spec- 
tacle of a candidate for a place upon the 
Bench going about with the ward workers and 
heelers and counseling with the local bosses 
concerning the best method of fixing things at 
the primary, and taking an active part in all 
the questionable proceedings which go by the 
name of practical politics. How often have we 



LORD COLERIDGE. 35 

seen judges juggling with their consciences 
in their efforts to do what they believed to be 
right without offending some active party work- 
ers who claimed to have fixed the delegates 
in the convention for them, and thus secured 
their nomination for the places they hold. 

"See," said the Lord Chancellor, "the 
contrast between your federal judges, who 
are appointed and have a life tenure, and 
your judges who are elected, and whose ten- 
ure depends upon the whim of party man- 
agers." When the mails are stopped ; when 
business is paralyzed ; when many good peo- 
ple fear that we are on the verge of anarchy 
and that popular government is a failure, we 
turn to the federal judiciary for the mainte- 
nance of law and order, and for the protection 
of life and property.* 

Of many things said there about English 

*This was written during the strike of 1894, when, 
at the command of Debs, the railway system of the 
West was tied up. Judge Woods, the United States 
Circuit Judge of the Seventh Circuit, issued his injunc- 
tion commanding Debs and his associates to stop in- 
terfering with the operation of the railways. For dis- 
obeying this order Debs has been tried for contempt of 
court and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment. 
The prompt action of Judge Woods ended the strike. 



36 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

politicians and English politics, it is not for 
me to speak ; only let me say that the En- 
glish women are keenly alive to all public 
questions, and discuss them with a relish and 
vigor which would surprise those who imagine 
that these high-bred ladies are wholly ab- 
sorbed in frivolous occupations. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 37 



CHAPTER V. 

A DAY or two after the dinner at Lord Cole- 
ridge's London mansion I received the fol- 
lowing letter : 

Star and Garter Hotel, ) 
Richmond, 19th July, 1891 (Surrey).) 

My Dear Sir — I mentioned to you that we should 
be at Warwick on Saturday next and at Birmingham 
the Wednesday following — on the circuit. If you 
like to see something of our circuit ways and customs 
I shall be glad to be your guide and host. I fear the 
capacity of the lodgings will not allow me to oifer you 
bed, but we shall be delighted to give you board, and 
there are very decent inns, both at Warwick and 
Birmingham. Warwick is an exceptionally beautiful 
and interesting place — full of fine things, especially 
the castle — and you will be in the very midst of Shaks- 
pere's country, whose name I spell as above, but not 
on the road to spell it Bacon. I have come here to rest 
for the Sunday, and to-morrow I have to go into Kent 
to have a " view " in a curious and important case be- 
ing tried before me without a jury. I leave London 
on Wednesday, but a line to i Sussex Square will 
alwaj'-s find me. Sincerely yours, Coleridge. 

W. P. Fishback, Esq. 



38 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Nothing could be more acceptable to an 
American lawyer visiting England than such 
an invitation, and I promptly answered that 
I would be at Warwick at the opening of the 
Assizes, The judge on the circuit is fur- 
nished with a house for himself and family to 
live in during the sessions, and as Lady Cole- 
ridge, her brother and sister and her friend, 
a Mrs. Barrington, of Devonshire, were on 
the circuit with Lord Coleridge, the house 
was full. I found comfortable lodgings at the 
Woolpack Inn, where I got my breakfasts, 
taking luncheon and dining with Lord Cole- 
ridge and family at the Judge's Lodgings, as 
it is called, a substantial structure designed 
by Inigo Jones. 

The expense of keeping up the judge's 
house is borne by the local authorities during 
the Assizes. By an ancient custom the lord 
of a neighboring manor sends for the table 
of the Lord Chief-Justice, when he is holding 
the Assizes, a haunch or saddle of venison, 
and sometimes an entire carcass. When the 
gift is received the marshal of the Lord Chief- 
Justice makes a formal and official acknowl- 
edgment, sending a simple "thanks" if it is 



LORD COLERIDGE. 39 

a haunch, "thanks for the handsome pres- 
ent" if it is a saddle, and "thanks for the 
splendid gift" if it is the entire animal. It 
was a splendid gift this time, and the venison 
was good and well dressed. It sometimes 
happens that owing to political differences or 
personal dislike the donor and the donee are 
not good friends, not even on speaking terms, 
but this causes no breach of the custom, 
which has been observed from a time whereof 
the memory of man runneth not to the con- 
trary. 

By another custom as old, whenever the 
Lord Chief-Justice comes to hold the Assizes 
in the Midland Circuit, Balliol College, of the 
University of Oxford, sends him a pair of 
immaculate kid gauntlets, which he wears at 
the opening ceremony. 

Lord Coleridge and family arrived at War- 
wick on Saturday, at 6 o'clock P. M., and the 
event was announced by the ringing of church 
bells. A corporation coach, attended by city 
ofificials and preceded by trumpeters, conveyed 
the city's guest to the Judge's Lodgings. An 
hour later I sent a note to his Lordship advis- 



40 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

ing him of my presence and soon received 
the following answer: 

Judge's Lodgings. 
Warwick, 26th July, 1891. 
My Dear Sir — I am glad you are here. I go to 
church in state at 11, which is a piece of our peacock 
life you might perhaps like to see. I will see that you 
have a place with my marshal if you like to come here 
about ten minutes to 11. This afternoon I am engaged, 
but I hope you will come and dine here at 7:45. Lady 
Coleridge is most anxious to thank you for that beauti- 
ful little volume of poems [Riley's " Old-fashioned 
Roses," published by Longmans in London] you sent 
her. She would have written yesterday, but she ar- 
rived late from London quite used up. Believe me to 
be yours very sincerely, Coleridge. 

I arrived at the Judge's Lodgings a few 
minutes before 1 1 and found everything in 
readiness. The chaplain had sent a large 
basket of roses which were beautifully ar- 
ranged on a center table in the reception 
room. And there was the Lord Chief-Justice, 
arrayed in all the bravery of his official tog- 
gery. His head was adorned with the enor- 
mous wig which is never worn except on state 
occasions and when the portrait painter is at 
his work. He wore the crimson robe, with the 
long "tail," and about his neck was a massive 



LORD COLERIDGE. 41 

gold chain which was first bestowed on 
the Chief-Justice in the time of Henry VIL 
His hands were encased in the white kid 
gauntlets — the gift from Balliol, his Lord- 
ship's college at Oxford. It was an impos- 
ing sight to see the crowds on the streets 
making way for the trumpeters who preceded 
the corporation carriage in which the Lord 
Chief-Justice, the mayor and the chaplain 
were carried to St. Mary's Church, where the 
chaplain preached a short and sensible ser- 
mon from the text, "Wherefore, I was not 
disobedient unto the heavenly vision." 

The building is a pretty piece of architect- 
ure, which was designed by Sir Christopher 
Wren, the architect of St. Paul's. The 
church was crowded, and the solemn service 
of the English Church was reverently attended 
to by everybody, from the Lord Chief-Justice 
to the "boots" from the inn. There is a 
democracy in the English churches which 
might well be copied in such churches as 
John Hall's, on Fifth avenue. New York, 
where the holders of the cushioned pews 
scowl at a stranger as if he were a Digger In- 
dian. 



42 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Coming out after the service, I noticed 
some shelves in the vestibule which were 
filled with bread. Lady Coleridge informed 
me that some charitable people in the time of 
Lord Leicester (Amy Robsart's husband) 
had, by their wills, set apart a fund to pro- 
vide this bread for the poor of the parish 
who have received it every Sunday since then. 

Going back to theWoolpack Inn, after ser- 
vice, I found there Mrs. Washington Gladden 
and her daughter, of Columbus, Ohio, who 
were staying over Sunday at Warwick, while 
Mr. Gladden had gone off to preach in a 
neighboring town, Leamington, I think ; a few 
minutes after, a messenger came from Lord 
Coleridge with his private key to the garden 
and park attached to the castle. This gave 
me a privilege seldom enjoyed by tourists, 
who are usually excluded from the grounds 
on Sundays, Mrs. Gladden and Miss Glad- 
den accompanied me in an afternoon ramble 
under the cedars and beeches, and along the 
banks of the Avon, which flows under the 
castle walls. Meeting the gardener, he con- 
ducted us through the graperies and fruit 
gardens, which showed the results of careful 



LORD COLERIDGE. 43 

and skillful tending, and gave splendid prom- 
ise of profuse fruitage for autumn and winter. 
At the turning of an alley we came suddenly 
upon a gentleman who seemed much sur- 
prised at our presence there. With perfect 
courtesy he asked us how we expected to get 
out of the grounds, which was, as we con- 
strued it, a euphemistic way of saying, " how 
did you happen to get in ? " When it was 
explained that Lord Coleridge had kindly 
given to me his private key, the gentleman 
bowed an apology, but told us that as the 
family were " in residence " at the castle, he 
would request us not to go inside of the inner 
court, a very proper request, which was 
cheerfully obeyed. Nothing can be lovelier 
than a bright July day amidst such scenes 
and associations. But as to all that see 
Baedeker passim. It was late in the after- 
noon when we got back to our inn, and I had 
barely time to dress for dinner at the Judge's 
Lodgings with Lord Coleridge and his family. 



44 RECOLLECTIONS OF 



CHAPTER VI. 

I HAD seen Lord Coleridge presiding as 
Chief-Justice in the Law Courts at London, 
and as host at a dinner party at his mansion 
in Sussex Square. I had also witnessed the 
"peacock" parade at church, of which he 
was the central figure, and I was now to have 
the pleasure of meeting him and his family 
in a less formal way at a Sunday dinner. 
Some correspondent in a letter recently pub- 
lished spoke of Lord Coleridge's beautifully 
modulated voice, and how, in cross-examin- 
ing an unwilling witness, he could win him 
over by the sweet courtesy of his words and 
manner. He had no faith in the "bow- 
wow ' ' style with which ignorant lawyers at- 
tempt to browbeat witnesses until the jur}^ 
and judge are exasperated, but took the 
witness into his confidence, so to speak, and, 



LORD COLERIDGE. 45 

maintaining the attitude of an honest and 
earnest seeker after the truth, usually suc- 
ceeded in getting a perfect disclosure. This 
voice of his was a great gift, or talent, rather, 
and the play of it in familiar talk with the mem- 
bers of his family was pleasant to hear. Without 
abating one jot of his dignity, he put every- 
body present upon a level with himself, and 
for the time being the Lord Chief-Justice disap- 
peared and the man Coleridge was manifest, 
though the ladies invariably addressed him 
in a half playful way as "Chief." 

It is not necessary to speak of the dinner, 
or of the manner in which it was set forth and 
served. The English dinner is one of the 
great triumphs of social life, and it is seen in 
its perfection when given by such hosts as 
Lord and Lady Coleridge. As to the menu, 
I did not think of it; as to the ladies' toil- 
ettes, they were in such perfect good taste 
that they did not attract attention, and the 
light-footed serving men came and went so 
quietly that they seemed to perform their of- 
fices by magic. 

Lord Coleridge was a prince of talkers, and 
his talk was of the great men he had known 



46 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

and of the great books with which he was fa- 
miliar. He spoke much of his friend, Matthew 
Arnold. They had lived as boys together in 
Devonshire, when they were six and seven 
years of age, Coleridge being Arnold's senior 
by one year. Even then, deep in their studies 
of Latin and Greek, there was formed a per- 
sonal and literary friendship which was only 
interrupted by death. At an age when our 
American boys are making mud pies in the 
kindergarten, Coleridge was reading Virgil 
under the tuition of his celebrated aunt, Sara 
T. Coleridge. Speaking of Arnold, he said 
that as son^ husband, father, brother, chum, 
friend and companion, he was always and 
everywhere the same genuine gentleman. 
Once Coleridge had the right to make a nom- 
ination for membership of some society at 
Oxford ; I do not remember what it was, but 
it was absolutely necessary that the candidate 
should make a speech, and Arnold had never 
made one, Coleridge named Arnold for the 
place, and notified him that he would be ex- 
pected to make a speech. " Matt, you must 
make a speech," said Coleridge. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 47 

"But I can't," said Arnold, "I never 
did such a thing in my life."' 

' ' But you must ; otherwise you can not be 
elected." 

"Well, ril try," said Arnold, despair- 
ingly = 

" It was a very poor speech, indeed," said 
Lord Coleridge, " but it fulfilled the condi- 
tion." 

Lord Coleridge was severe in his criticism 
of Louis Napoleon and the Empress Eugenie, 
He had known the former personally, and 
knew enough of him to know that he was a 
beasto As Emperor of the French, he did 
everything in his power to minister to the 
lowest tastes of his people that they might 
tolerate his dynasty. He said he had once de- 
nounced Eugenie publicly, and she was the 
only woman he had ever felt called upon to treat 
in that manner. As Empress, she was a 
cold-blooded, scheming woman, cruel and 
ambitious, and she more than any one else 
was responsible for the Franco-German war 
and all the suffering it caused and the humilia- 
tion of France. While he had no criticism to 
make of the Queen's ofifiicial recognition of 



48 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

the deposed Empress, he found fault with 
her fondness and liking for a woman of such 
a history — it tended to salve over and give a 
sort of approval to a character thoroughly- 
unscrupulous. There has been an effort of 
late in some of the English periodicals to ex- 
cuse or palliate the conduct of Eugenie in 
forcing her husband and son to take part in 
the disastrous campaign which had such a 
swift and disgraceful ending at Sedan, but 
the public voice and the verdict of history 
will be against her. 

Lord Coleridge told a story of the elope- 
ment of the late Charles Mathews, who ran 
away with a Mrs. D., who had a son by her 
lawful husband. Mathews carried away 
mother and son, and he was such a jolly 
good stepfather that the boy — now a man — 
calls himself Mathews and is known by no 
other name. Many of my readers will re- 
member Mr. Mathews and his engagement at 
Indianapolis about twenty-five years ago. 
"Cool as a Cucumber" was the title of a 
farce-comedy, which, I believe, he wrote 
himself, and in which he played the leading 
part. He was then on his way to England 



LORD COLERIDGE. 49 

and had been a year in Australia and Califor- 
nia. He was tired of the everlasting sunshine 
and was pining for an English drizzle and a 
London fog. In company with Mr. Halford, 
of the Indianapolis Journal, I called on him 
at the Bates Hotel, where we found him in a 
happy mood. We were having a nasty Feb- 
ruary day, and Mathews said he began to feel 
as though he were getting home again. He 
did not allow us to go without cracking a 
bottle of wine with him. Of Charles Math- 
ews, the elder, Lord Coleridge said that he 
was the most versatile and remarkable man 
who had appeared on the modern English 
stage. With a green curtain for a back- 
ground, a plain table and chair and a box 
filled with trumpery for a setting, Mathews 
would come on in an ordinary dress, seat 
himself at the table, and for two hours would 
keep the audience in a roar of laughter at his 
story telling and characterizations. During 
the vacations Mathews would visit Yorkshire, 
Lancashire and other localities to gather sto- 
ries and learn the dialects. He confessed 
that the Devonshire dialect was too much for 
him. 



50 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Macready, Lord Coleridge said, was also 
an actor of great power and versatility. The 
actor who was to play Richmond to his Rich- 
ard once asked: "Where shall I hit you, 
Mr. Macready?" "Wherever you can, sir," 
was the answer. Macready was a perfect 
master of fence. 

Invariably in addressing his wife's broth- 
er and sister, Lord Coleridge called them 
"brother" and "sister." "Mr. Fishback, 
you will please take my sister to the table," 
he would say. We are accustomed to ridi- 
cule and laugh at the disinclination of the 
House of Lords to pass the bill which has so 
often gone through the Commons for remov- 
ing the legal bar which prohibits marriage 
with a "deceased wife's sister." Matthew 
Arnold, in one of his essays, says that, while 
upon principle there seems to be no excuse 
for the existing law, it can be justified on the 
ground of delicacy. And I can well see that 
there would be a shock to the sensibilities of 
a refined person in the bare suggestion of 
such a relation. It may be called squeamish- 
ness — ^but a little dash of that even might be 
of value to our robust American character. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 51 



CHAPTER VIL 

On Monday morning, July 27, at 11 o'clock, 
I went to the Judge's Lodgings, where I met 
Mr. Baring Lawford, the brother of Lady 
Coleridge, who conducted me to a seat on the 
judge's bench in the court room. Presently 
the Lord Chief-Justice, clad in his crimson 
robe, a wig with long curls, wearing his im- 
maculate kids and carrying about his neck 
the massive gold chain, and escorted by the 
high sheriff, clerk and bailiffs, came into the 
room, and, after a stately bow to the barris- 
ters and those present, who stood up at his 
entrance, and the proclamation of the crier, 
his Lordship took his seat and the Assizes were 
open. The grand jurors arose, the oath was 
first administered to the foreman and then to the 
other jurors, three at a time, each juror obey- 
ing the injunction given by the clerk at the 



52 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

end of the oath to "kiss the book." The 
oath was in substance, and almost in words, 
like the oath now administered to grand jurors 
in all the American criminal courts. 

I was peculiarly struck by the make-up of 
the grand jury, which was composed of men of 
education and of commanding influence in the 
county. It is esteemed as a privilege and 
an honor to serve in that capacity. Here 
it is considered by many of our best citi- 
zens as an intolerable burden. A short oral 
charge was given by the judge, and the jury 
retired to an upper chamber directly over 
the judge's seat to consider the indictments 
presented by the crown offtcers. The court 
room was small, circular in form, with a 
gallery supported by pillars running around 
the entire room. The attorneys and solicitors, 
clad in ordinary citizens' dress, occupied a 
small space in the center, directly under the 
judge's bench; the barristers, in wigs and 
gowns, were ranged on two benches to the 
left, and the jury box was on the opposite 
side of the room, so that the barristers address- 
ing the jury spoke over the heads of the at- 
torneys and solicitors, who occupied the pit 



LORD COLERIDGE. 53 

in the center. To the right of the jury box 
were the witness stand and the prisoner's 
dock. While the grand jury were deliberating 
Lord Coleridge turned to me and said: "I 
will now go out and rid myself of some of this 
superfluous toggery.* 

*NotwithstandingLord Coleridge's talk about his wig 
and "tail" and "toggery," he was certainly conscious of 
the fact that these official belongings are not without 
their use. Under the American system of an elective 
judiciary and short tenures, the Bench has declined in 
ability. Excepting the federal judges, and those who 
are appointed or elected for long terms, it can not be 
said that they are as a rule selected from the ablest 
and most learned of the profession. Dependent upon 
popular favor, and, worse still, often dependent upon 
the wire-pullers and " practical politicians," so-called, 
for their places, it is difficult for our elective judges to 
maintain that independence and dignity of character 
which are essential to a good judge. Some of our 
candidates for the Bench, on the eve of elections, go 
about with the " bosses " and " fixers " to the beer- 
gardens soliciting votes. Colonel Ingersoll once said 
that the Comanche Indians could be made peacea- 
ble, if, instead of blankets, the government would com- 
pel them to wear stove-pipe hats and dress coats. The 
wearing of gowns by the judges of our state courts would 
not make Marshalls and Story s of all of them, but it 
would raise questions in the public mind, and in their 
own minds possibly, as to their fitness for judicial 
stations. Hooker, in his Church Polity, insists, with 



54 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Lord Coleridge returned in a short time with 
a lighter wig with short curls. He had hardly- 
resumed his seat when the foreman of the 
grand jury, from the gallery above, handed 
down to the clerk, whose desk \vas at the 
right of the judge, an indictment which was 
presented at the end of a staff about ten feet 
long. 

The clerk took the document from the 
ring in which it was enclosed, inspected it a 
moment to see if it were properly signed and 
indorsed, announced the name of the defendant, 
who immediately appeared in the dock, and, 
after arraignment and plea, the petit jury was 
sworn to try the case. The prisoners to be 
tried had been committed by the examining 
magistrates and the indictments had been pre- 
pared before the assembling of the grand jury. 

strong reason, upon the clergy wearing a dress befitting 
their office. He sajs, " Notwithstanding both judges, 
through the garments of judicial authority, and through 
the ornaments of sovereignty princes, yea bishops 
through the very attire of bishops, are made blessed, 
that is to say, marked and manifested, they are to be 
such as God hath poured his blessing upon by advanc- 
ing them above others and placing them where they 
may do Him powerful good service." 



LORD COLERIDGE. 5 5 

The examinations by the grand jury were 
very brief, and the witnesses came at once 
from the grand jury room into cou^rt to testify 
at the trial. This was a very expeditious 
way of transacting business, but the theory of 
the EngHsh people is that the criminal laws 
and the criminal courts are enacted and estab- 
lished to punish offenders rather than to afford 
tricky and eloquent advocates an opportunity 
to befuddle witnesses and jurors, to the end 
that felons may escape punishment. Upon 
the whole, I prefer the swift, sure, but, at the 
same time, careful methods of English crimi- 
nal jurisprudence to our cumbersome, tech- 
nical, dilatory way of dealing with criminals. 
Even when supplemented by the proceedings 
of Judge Lynch and the White Caps, our 
efforts come short of what good citizens have 
a right to expect in a civilized country. 

The barrister, holding the brief for the 
prosecution, rose in his place as soon as the 
prisoner appeared and stated the case to the 
jury. He then produced and examined his 
witnesses. Following this came the address 
of the barrister, defending, and, after the 
witnesses for the defense were heard, the 



56 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

judge summed up, or, as we say, charged 
the jury. There were no motions to quash 
indictments, or to continue cases, or to 
change the venue ; no instructions were pre- 
pared by wily counsel to trap the court into 
an error, and the charges were oral. The sum- 
ming up by Lord Coleridge was comprehen- 
sive and fair. No point in the evidence for 
the prosecution or the defense was slurred or 
unduly emphasized. A barrister told me that 
there was no judge in England whose recol- 
lection of testimony was so accurate. With- 
out having taken a note he would state the 
substance of every witness's story, so that 
when the judge finished the jury were ready 
to return their verdict. In every case the ver- 
dict was returned after a short consultation in 
the box ; the jury did not retire from the court 
room once, and the longest time occupied in 
their deliberations, on a single case, did not 
exceed ten minutes. 

In one case the jury acquitted a prisoner 
who the judge thought should have been con- 
victed, and he jokingly remarked that Mr. 
W., the barrister for the defense, had beaten 
him in that case. He was not seriously 



LORD COLERIDGE. 57 

offended, however. It was a charge of crimi- 
nal assault upon a young woman, whose 
testimony was very positive as to the fact, 
but she did not make it quite clear why 
no outcry was made until a couple of young 
men coming over a stile in the hedge row 
surprised her and the prisoner in a com- 
promising position. What was remarkable 
in the case was that the witnesses detailed the 
facts without being allowed to dwell upon the 
disgusting details, which are usually elicited 
with so much gusto by dirty-minded attorneys 
in our criminal courts. When the prosecu- 
trix stated that the defendant was "taking pro- 
ceedings" with her, the judge said "that is 
sufficiently explicit." 

A clerk in a Birmingham bank had been 
guilty of forging checks amounting to $7,500. 
The crime had been committed only a short 
time before the trial. When the prisoner rose 
to receive his sentence the Chief-Justice ad- 
dressed him substantially as follows : "Young 
man, you have been holding a position of great 
trust, and you have betrayed it. I should 
have very little respect for myself, per- 
sonally, or for the great office I hold, if I 



58 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

should consider your offense a light one. I 
give you ten years' penal servitude." 

It will occur to my readers that this method 
of dealing with bank wreckers is somewhat 
summary when contrasted with our ways of 
doing things. A few instances of sure, swift 
and severe punishment in such cases would 
have a wholesome effect upon the conduct of 
our bank officials. No dilatory motions fol- 
low the verdict. As soon as it is announced 
sentence is pronounced and the convict is sent 
to prison. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 59 



CHAPTER Vin. 

I NOTICED that Lord Coleridge had a doc- 
ument which he examined with care just be- 
fore pronouncing sentence. The following 
letter, from Mr. Egerton B. Lawford, the 
marshal of the court, and a brother of Lady- 
Coleridge, explains it: 

July 30, 1891. 
Dear Mr. Fishback — I am directed by the Lord 
Chief -Justice to forward to vou the inclosed calendar 
of prisoners tried at Warwick this week. His Lord- 
ship thinks it may be of interest to you containing, 
as it does, a record of previous convictions against the 
prisoners, which information is supplied for the sole 
and exclusive use of the judge; such information being 
carefully withheld from the knowledge of the jury. I 
hope you may have a pleasant trip to Paris and a safe 
journey home. 

The calendar of prisoners to be tried at the 
Summer Assizes, to be holden at the Shire 
Hall, Warwick, on Saturday, the 25th day 



6o RECOLLECTIONS OF 

of July, 1 89 1, contains the names of the 
prisoners to be tried, with a record showing 
description of the offenses with which they 
are charged, and a statement of other crimes 
of which they may have been convicted. To 
this was afifixed the certificate of the governor 
of the prison in these words : 

" I certify that to the best of my knowledge and be- 
lief, the several prisoners have been convicted as stated 
above. H. W. Parr, Governor." 

If the letter "N" were opposite the name, it 
signified the prisoner could neither read nor 
write ; the letter ' 'R" that he could read, but 
not write ; ' ' Imp . ' ' that he could read and write 
imperfectly, "Well" that he could read 
and write well. ' ' Sup. ' ' meant superior edu- 
cation. Then followed the mystery or call- 
ing of the prisoner, as sailor, shoemaker, 
watchmaker, painter, laborer, clerk, brass- 
founder. Then followed some of the convic- 
tions . For instance , A , " 5 years in reformatory 
for having unlawful possession of an album;" 
B, " one summary conviction for cruelty to a 
dog;" C, " 14 days for stealing a hat, 21 
days for stealing 31-2 lbs. beef, seven sum- 



LORD COLERIDGE. 6i 

mary convictions for assault and vagrancy." 
D, " 5 years penal servitude for stealing 7 
shillings and 6d." When the Chief-Justice 
read this, his face flushed with indignation 
and he said, "I can not understand these 
ferocious penalties inflicted by the local mag- 
istrates- — what would they do in cases of 
crime with violence?" In view of this he let 
the prisoner off with a mild sentence of four 
months for burglary. I was informed that the 
Chief-Justice often paid a barrister a fee for 
defending a poor prisoner. The county pays 
the barrister who prosecutes. To a prisoner 
who was convicted of stealing 8 shillings and 
some napkins from an old lady, whom he 
knocked dov/n, the Chief-Justice said, " You 
have committed a crime with violence, and I 
visit your crime with a heavy hand, I give 
you 18 months at hard labor," He also 
read a lecture to the constable, " Why did 
you arrest this man, sir ?" "I arrested and 
searched him and made the charge against 
him, because I knew him to be a thief." 
" You had better be careful about arresting 
people on suspicion, or you will be cast some 



62 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

day." * It so happened in the case on trial 
that the proof justified the arrest. After one 
of the adjournments, Lord Coleridge asked me 
what I thought of his way of disposing of the 
criminal calendar. I told him it seemed to me 
to be a summary way of doing things, but that 
I believed every man had had a fair trial, and 
that the jury had done right in every case, 
even in the one where they beat his Lordship 
and acquitted a prisoner who, in his opinion, 
was guilty. 

The grand jury were in session two hours, 
and at the end of that time they had returned 
into court twelve indictments. These were 
all disposed of in two days and a half. Dur- 
ing the trial of one case, in which a number 
of witnesses were examined, his Lordship nod- 
ded as if he were asleep. The barrister de- 
fending, a Mr. W,, went on with his examin- 
ation of the witnesses, but seemed to be em- 
barrassed, fearing that the judge was not 



* This is in fine contrast with the disregard of the 
rights of the citizen by Mayor Denny, of Indianapolis, 
who in a communication to the Century Magazine 
plumes himself upon the fact that he gave the police 
carte blanche to seize, try, convict and iiog all persons 
whom they had reason to suspect of being " tramps." 



LORD COLERIDGE. 6z 

hearing the testimony. When Mr. W, had 
concluded, Lord Coleridge opened his eyes 
and proceeded at once with his summing up, 
which showed that he had not missed a syl- 
lable of the evidence. In a former paper I 
spoke of the charm of his voice. This was 
shown in a marked manner in his charge to 
the jury. Pure English, spoken as Lord Col- 
eridge spoke it, may be made as musical as 
Italian or French. Perfect enunciation, with 
just enough stress and volume to be heard by 
the persons addressed, without gesticulation 
or undue waste of lung power, give the speak- 
er an immense advantage over the hammer- 
and-tongs oratory which mars the speech of 
so many of our lawyers and public men. 

Western lawyers have this fault in great 
excess, and on a recent occasion in the Su- 
preme Court at Washington the judges request- 
ed an attorney to address them, if possible, 
without making so much noise. Soon after 
the case was disposed of an admiralty case 
was heard by the court, in which it was 
claimed that a collision of two vessels in a 
fog was caused by the failure of one of them 
to sound the fog-horn. It was shown that 



64 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

the machinery for sounding the horn was out 
of order, but it was claimed that a sailor with 
a powerful voice was used as an effective 
substitute. One of the Supreme Judges re- 
marked, that if it could be shown that Mr. 

, of (naming the noisy attorney), 

was on the vessel at the time the defense 
might be good. 

Once Chief-Justice Marshall sent the mar- 
shal of the court to whisper to a Cincinnati at- 
torney, who was addressing the court after the 
manner of a horse auctioneer, that the judges 
were not deaf. Governor Hendricks of Indiana 
was an example of how effective a speech may 
be made without vociferous ranting. I have seen 
him leave the platform after speaking for an 
hour to a crowd in the open air without show- 
ing the slightest sign of fatigue. Americans 
make a goodwdeal of fun of John Bull's way 
of speaking his mother tongue, but careful 
observation of the speech of cultivated English 
ladies and gentlemen will convince any one 
that they use the language with tolerable skill 
and accuracy. 

During the trial of one case a clownish wit- 
ness with a mirth-provoking stutter was tell- 



LORD COLERIDGE. 65 

ing his story in the Cousin Sally Dillard 
style and seemed to be utterly unable to get 
through. He saw that the jury, the barris- 
ters, the bystanders and even the Lord Chief- 
Justice were all amused, but he overdid 
the thing, and after the fun had gone far 
enough his Lordship said: " Mr. Witness, 
you have made us all laugh heartily, but you 
must now get on with your story ; if you do 
not you will go somewhere else." These 
words, spoken with gentleness, firmness and 
dignity, produced a magical effect and the 
witness found his tongue without difficulty. 



66 RECOLLECTIONS OF 



CHAPTER IX. 

The barrister, Mr. W., who took dinner at 
the Judge's Lodgings on Tuesday, gave me 
some interesting information concerning the 
relations the attorneys and barristers have to- 
wards one another. A barrister may not 
"tout" for retainers nor "hug" for business. 
If on the circuit he must not eat at the same 
table with the attorneys. If he chances to 
stop at the same inn his meals must be served 
in his own apartment; he must not ride in 
the same coach with a solicitor or an attor- 
ney, nor smoke in the same room, nor bestow 
on him or receive from him any hospitality. 
It would be a gross breach of professional de- 
corum for a barrister to waltz or dance with 
any member of a solicitor's family, for this 
would be a gross example of "hugging" for 



LORD COLERIDGE. 67 

business.* The phrase "briefless barrister" 
came to me with a meaning and emphasis 
that were new to me. After several years of 
circuit riding v/ithout a retainer, the young 
barrister is apt to conclude that he has missed 
his vocation, and he betakes himself to the 
colonies, or does newspaper, or magazine, or 
other literary work in London or the provinces. 
It has been stated recently, on what seemed 

•*When Jim Fisk and Jaj Gould were working out 
Fisk's formula that it was " easier to rescue property 
from the owners" than to acquire it bj^ legitimate 
methods, thej retained some go-between attorneys 
and hired Tammany judges to work the plan. The 
judges were driven in disgrace from the Bench, but 
the rascals retained the fruits of their crimes, and the 
lawyers pocketed their fat fees without a twinge of con- 
trition. What Fisk and Gould did in a sort of R.obin 
Hood way is now accomplished by sneak-thief lawyers,, 
who peddle to their clients their supposed influence 
with judges upon whom they have or claim to have 
some social or political " pull." There was an outcry 
against this abuse during the last campaign in Indiana, 
when it was alleged that the claims of certain candi- 
dates for the Bench were being pushed by some lawyers 
who it was charged had a pass-key to the back stairs 
leading to the judges' chambers. This practice is sim- 
ply shocking, and the fact that it is allowed by some 
judges, and is used by otherwise reputable attorneys, 
does not abate a jot of its enormity. 



68 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

to be good authority, that only about lO per 
cent, of the young men who are called to the 
bar succeed in making their way. This is a 
melancholy showing when one considers how 
much time and money they have spent in the 
effort to qualify themselves for the work of 
their profession. 

It was at the Warwick Assizes, in March, 
1 77 1, that the case of Rex vs. Donnelan was 
tried before Justice Duller. I saw the origi- 
nal records of the case, which are kept at the 
Judge's Lodgings. Donnelan was tried for 
murder, being charged with poisoning a kins- 
man, a nephew, I think. The defendant was 
a man of property and influence. The trial 
began at 7: 30 A. M., on Friday, March 30; 
at 6: 34 P. M. there was a verdict of guilty; 
the prisoner was sentenced immediately and 
was hanged early on the following Monday 
morning. It was a case resting upon circum- 
stantial evidence, and Justice Buller's charge 
to the jury has, ever since that time, been 
regarded as a leading authority on the prin- 
ciples of presumptive proof. The celebrated 
Dr. Hunter, whose bust is in Leicester Square, 
London, came down to Warwick and testified 



LORD COLERIDGE. 69 

as an expert for the defense against several 
other physicians who gave opinions as to the 
cause of death. The jury discredited Hun- 
ter, and at the time it was rumored that his 
sworn statement was procured by the payment 
of a large fee. "This," said Lord Coleridge, 
"was the only stain upon the name of one of 
the greatest physicians England ever had."* 



*The hired professional expert witness has got to 
be such a nuisance, such an obstruction to the admin- 
istration of justice, that he has been expelled from the 
courts of two civilized countries — France and Ger- 
many — and has been denounced and discredited in the 
highest courts of England and the United States. In 
a case reported in 21 How., pp. 8S-100, Mr. Justice 
Grier said in his opinion: " Experience has shown that 
opposite opinions of persons professing to be experts 
may be obtained to any amount ; and it often happens 
that not only many days, but even weeks are consumed 
in cross-examinations to test the knowledge or skill of 
the witnesses and the correctness of their opinions, 
wasting the time of the court and wearying its patience, 
and perplexing instead of elucidating the questions in- 
volved in the issue." Mr. Justice McLean, when on 
the circuit, said in a case reported in 6 McLean 303, 
that " the opinions of experts who have been examined 
are in conflict, and, so far as my experience goes, this 
has been uniformly the case where experts have been 
examined." In the Tracy Peerage case, Lord Camp. 
bell said of an expert: " I do not mean to throw any 



70 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Lord Coleridge met Grant when Grant was 
in Europe, and met Sherman in America in 
1883. At a banquet Sherman told him a 
story, which may be an old one, about his oc- 
cupation of Atlanta in 1864. The ministers 
were much exercised about their worship and 
consulted Sherman about it. He told them 
to proceed as usual. "But how about pray- 
ing for President Lincoln?" asked the minis- 
reflection on Sir Frederick Madden. I dare saj he is 
a very respectable gentleman, and did not mean to give 
any evidence that was untrue, but really this confirms 
my opinion that hardly any w^eight is to be given to 
scientific witnesses ; they come with a bias on their 
minds to support the cause in which they are embarked, 
and it appears to me that Sir Frederick Madden, if he 
had been a witness in a cause and had been asked on a 
different occasion Avhat he thought of this handwriting, 
would have given a totally different answer." The 
abuse is notorious in patent cases. Hired liars march 
in platoons to bolster up or destroy letters patent, and 
the office of many a patent attorney is converted into 
an incubator for hatching perjuries. It is high time 
for some legislation to stop this disreputable business 
in our courts. A law providing for unbiased experts 
appointed by the court to report on scientific questions 
involved in the litigation, would do much toward the 
extermination of the pestilential brood, whose presence 
in our courts recalls the old days when professional 
perjurers wore straws in their shoes to let shysters 
know that they were in the market. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 71 

ter. "Don't do it," said Sherman. "Lin- 
coln is doing very well and doesn't need your 
prayers." "How about President Davis?" 
"Oh," said Sherman, "pray for him with all 
your might; he greatly needs your prayers." 
When on exhibition, Grant seemed little in- 
clined to talk, and made the impression on 
Lord Coleridge that he was a very taciturn 
person, an impression which is common with 
those who do not know how glib and humor- 
ous Grant's volubility was when he was with 
his intimate friends. 



72 RECOLLECTIONS OF 



CHAPTER X. 

Warwick was the birthplace or home of 
Walter Savage Landor. The house was 
shown me where he had lived. A friend of 
Lord Coleridge, a Mr. M., who lived at War- 
wick, was a very nice, precise gentleman, of 
great delicacy of feeling and high sense of 
propriety, a man much with the ladies, assist- 
ing in their social affairs and church functions. 
Landor and Mr. M. were once walking to- 
gether, and just as they were opposite to 
where some lady friends were standing, Lan- 
dor, who was very violent and abusive at 
times, was speaking of some duke whom, 
with great emphasis and a violent gesture at 
his walking companion, he denounced as an 
"infernal scoundrel." M., fearing that the 
ladies would suppose that he was the object 
of Landor' s malediction, cried out, so that the 



LORD COLERIDGE. 73 

ladies could hear him, "That was what you 
said to the duke, Mr. Landor?" 

At dinner on Wednesday I met a Mr. Hill, 
who was a nephew of the poet Southey, and 
whose wife was Southey's daughter. Mr. 
Hill is or was about eighty years old, and 
was a tutor at Rugby under Dr. Arnold. His 
unmarried daughter was with him, and is 
the only surviving child of a large family. 
Through the influence of his friends, who 
knew him when they were boys at Rugby, 
the old gentleman had a place in some en- 
dowed school in Warwickshire, which yielded 
him an income of £700. He was a gentle 
old man, whose lifelong occupation as a 
teacher had polished and softened his charac- 
ter to a temper that was alert, intelligent and 
courteous, and which at his great age gave 
him a special charm. He was compelled to 
go when the ladies retired, his health being 
such as to forbid late hours. 

The talk over the port was varied and inter- 
esting. Sara T. Coleridge, the aunt of Lord 
Coleridge, had put him through his paces in 
Greek and Latin when he was too young to 
go to Eton. He was warmly attached to 



74 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

her and revered and spoke of her as " a saint- 
ly woman." Being at dinner once he heard 
Carlyle say of his aunt: "Yes, she was a 
vera fine creature — a vera fine creature — but 
she was always drunk." Lord Coleridge 
ftred up instantly and said : ' ' Mr. Carlyle, 
if you mean to say that she was ever or fre- 
quently under the influence of strong drink, 
what you say is false. During the last two 
years of her life, when she was dying of can- 
cer, she may have occasionally taken opium 
to deaden the pain, but in any other way she 
was never drunk." The raspy old Scotch- 
man, who. Lord Coleridge said, was an "old 
brute," made no answer. I found among the 
company generally an unfavorable opinion of 
Carlyle, who is counted a man of powerful in- 
tellect, but who was possessed of insane prej- 
udices and Avorked upon very narrow lines. 

Lord Coleridge said the stories of Sydney 
Smith's wit were not exaggerated. He had 
met him at dinners, and on such occa- 
sions Smith kept the company in a roar of 
laughter, until they suffered with pain from 
side-ache. Once when Smith and a number 
of guests were entertained at Holland House, 



LORD COLERIDGE. 75 

he dined with George IV, then Prince of 
Wales, and remarked that the Duke of Or- 
leans was a very bad man. " But," retorted 
the Prince, " the Abbe — who was a friend to 
the Duke — was a much more despicable 
character, and he was a priest." For once 
the clerical wit got the worst of it. This story 
of Beau Brummel and George IV, which was 
told by his lordship, may be new to some of 
my readers. At a company where George 
IV, then Prince of Wales, was entertaining a 
number of friends, Brummel made a bet that 
he could make the fat Prince ring the bell for 
the servant. So he said: "Prince, will you 
please ring the bell?" "Certainly," said 
His Royal Highness. He rang the bell 
promptly, and when the servant appeared 
said: " Order Mr. Brummel's carriage im- 
mediately, that he may go home." The 
Beau won his bet, but he lost his night's 
frolic. 

Speaking of our late ministers to England, 
Lord Coleridge said Lowell was a most lova- 
ble man and very popular with the intellect- 
ual and literary people, but that as a man of 
affairs and diplomate Phelps was greatly his su- 



76 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

perior. He had hoped that Cleveland would 
make Mr. Phelps Chief-Justice when Judge 
Waite's death made a vacancy. Of Mr. Rob- 
ert Lincoln, our minister, he said he had been 
received kindly on account of the veneration en- 
tertained for his father, but that he had fine ele- 
ments of character, and by force of his own 
merit was gaining rapidly in the esteem of the 
people. At a banquet given to Mr. Lowell 
soon after he came to England as minister. Lord 
Coleridge, in some remarks made as toastmas- 
ter, or in response to a toast, alluded in terms 
of pleasantry to Mr. Lowell's celebrated essay 
on "A Certain Condescension in Foreigners, ' ' 
which is surcharged with Anglophobia. Mr. 
Lowell took the allusion unkindly, fearing that 
it would stir up a feeling of animosity against 
him. This oversensitiveness was a grave 
fault in Mr. Lowell's character. I went to 
Chicago several years ago to hear his address 
on "The Independent in Politics," which he 
was invited to deliver on Washington's birth- 
day in Central Music Hall before the Union 
League Club and some Democratic society. 
He was pleasantly entertained in Chicago by 
men of both parties, and the audience was 



LORD COLERIDGE. 77 

prepared to hear him give the political work- 
ers and the men who do "practical politics" 
a good drubbing, and to take their punish- 
ment good-naturedly. Coming upon the plat- 
form in presence of several thousand expec- 
tant listeners, he announced that he had 
changed his topic and would deliver a literary 
address to prove that Shakspere did not 
write the play of " Richard IIL" It was a 
melancholy sight to see the citizens of the 
pig-sticking city sleep while Mr. Lowell went 
through his labored and rather ineffectual lite- 
rary performance. It was explained afterward 
that Mr. Lowell had been so well treated by 
the politicians of Chicago that he was afraid 
his political address would give offense. 

Sipping port after dinner Lord Coleridge 
paid a high compliment to " Cook's Imperi- 
al" wine, which he said was, in his judgment, 
equal, if not superior, to most of the cham- 
pagne imported from France. And this led 
up to an amusing story of a country gentle- 
man of Devonshire who gave a fete to the 
villagers and tenants upon his estate. To do 
the handsome thing the host served the best 
brands of port, claret and champagne. A 



78 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

tenant, after refreshing himself by sampling 
the drinks, was asked if he would have some 
more. He answered that the high-priced 
port and the claret were very good, but for 
his part he ' ' would like a little more of the 
plain cider," meaning the costly champagne, 
which he had been guzzling with great gusto. 
I was booked for a trip to Paris and was 
compelled to decline Lord Coleridge's invita- 
tion to go with him to the Birmingham As- 
sizes. Upon taking my leave Lady and Lord 
Coleridge expressed the hope that I might 
go to their country home in Devonshire, 
where they expected to be late in August, 
but the Etruria, in which I had secured a 
berth, was to sail for New York on the 2 2d 
of August, and I had to deny myself the 
pleasure of seeing them at Ottery St. Marys, 
which, for several generations, has been the 
home of the Coleridges. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 79 



CHAPTER XL 

Before leaving England I wrote to Lord 
Coleridge, thanking him for the kindness he 
had shown me. Coming back to London, 
after a two weeks' visit to Paris, I found the 
following letter awaiting me at the Tavistock 
Hotel : 

Judge's Lodgings, Edgbaston, Birmingham, 

Aug. 8, 1891. 
My Dear Mr. Fishback — It is a great pleasure to 
me to have been able in any vv^ay to make your stay in 
England more agreeable and interesting than it would 
otherwise have been. I can assure you with per- 
fect truth that I owe Mr. Justice Harlan a real 
debt of gratitude for introducing you to me. All 
around, we were equally delighted, and I shall not 
forget those few days at Warwick spent in your 
company. I am old and indolent, and a very bad cor- 
respondent, but it will give me unfeigned pleasure to 
hear from you when you get back to your own country. 
To America I must always have the warmest feelings 
of regard. From the first hour of my stay in the States 



8o RECOLLECTIONS OF 

to the last I was feasted, honored — I had almost said 
" petted," so that if it had gone on much longer, I 
should have had my head turned. 

I knew, however, to what I was coming back too 
well. You have seen the best side of us, and I 
am neither so polite nor disloyal as to question that we 
have a good side. And bad as our politics seem to me 
just now to be, and awful as the descent is from Sir 
Robert Peel and Lord John Russell to " Dizzy," and 
Lord Salisbury and Chamberlain, still we are at pres- 
ent free from that personal corruption which seems to 
taint your politics and that of the Dominion. But our 
press, though rather better educated, is to the full as 
vile as yours, and it has a swagger and insufferable 
pretense and self-assertion from which you are free. 
And our court and aristocracy degrade the independ- 
ence and corrupt the manliness and integrity of the 
vast numbers who are brought within their influence. 
I don't suppose we are by nature worse than you, but 
you are happily preserved from corrupting influences 
to which we are all our lives exposed. 

I am sorry to be obliged to say that we shall not be 
at Heath's Court till the 22d of this month, and I 
rather fear from what you said that this may be too 
late for you to come to us there. But it will give us 
real pleasure, if you should prolong your stay on this 
side for a few days more, to receive you there on any 
day after the 22d, if you can and will come to us. Be- 
lieve me to be. Yours very sincerely, 

Coleridge. 

Several things are to be noted about this 
letter, I do not think I violate any rule of 



LORD COLERIDGE. 8i 

propriety in making it public, except, pos- 
sibly, that part of it which makes reference 
to myself. Modesty would probably have 
suggested the suppression of so much of it;, 
but, as Socrates would say, "at my time of 
life" — being now several years past sixty — 
my skin is getting to be somewhat tanned and 
tough, and when I do blush, as I confess I 
am often constrained to do for my own short- 
comings, to say nothing of those of my 
friends, I get no credit for it. This apart, 
there is food for reflection in what Lord Cole- 
ridge says about public matters here and in 
England. Being out of active politics and 
having once been a very active politician, he 
was well qualified to take a fair view of social 
and political tendencies in both countries. 
And then he was a man broadened by thor- 
ough education, extensive reading and fine 
literary taste. To him, as to every right- 
minded and intelligent person, there is some- 
thing shocking in the prevalent spirit of he- 
donism which seems to be running riot in the 
civilized world. The English court and aris- 
tocracy, no less than the corrupt and corrupt- 
6 



82 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

ing coterie of politicians and jobbers of legis- 
lation at Washington, are doing everything in 
their power to poison the currents of social 
and political life. 

What Lord Coleridge says in Jiis letter of 
the press and the aristocracy he has doubt- 
less expressed more publicly in England, and 
his well-known views have called forth much 
unfriendly criticism of his public career. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 83 



CHAPTER XIL 

Some flunky correspondent of the Morning 
Advertiser, of New York, in a letter published 
in that paper May 27, 1894, while Lord Cole- 
ridge was dying, echoes the wishes and re- 
sentments of that part of the aristocracy who 
have had titles thrust upon them and who 
have not achieved greatness as such peers as 
Coleridge and Russell, the present Lord Chief- 
Justice, have done. This correspondent, who 
signs himself "Wycollar," says : "The seri- 
ous illness of Lord Coleridge has evoked feel- 
ings on the part of the public the reverse of 
sympathetic, and, although no newspaper has 
ventured to make any reference thereto in 
print, yet the almost universal expression of 
opinion, in club and salon, has been to the 
effect that it would be a good thing on the 



84 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

whole if he were not to recover." The frank 
brutahty of this statement is, as I take it, a 
pretty fair exhibition of the tone and temper 
of that class of the aristocracy who coddle 
"Buffalo Bill" and George Gould, and who 
regard prize-fighting, horse-racing and gam- 
bling as the chief occupations of a gentleman. 
Let it be noted that Lord Coleridge, who 
seemed to come between the wind and the 
nobility of these gentlemen of the "club" and 
"salon," was the lifelong and intimate friend 
of Cardinal Newman, Professor Jowett, the 
master of Balliol, and Matthew Arnold, all 
members of what Lord Coleridge's illustrious 
kinsman designated "the great peerage of 
undying intellect." If a man is to be known 
by his friends, I suggest to "Wycollar" and 
other such journalistic vermin that the good 
name of Lord Coleridge will not suffer by the 
neglect or active hostility of the sporting gen- 
tlemen who desired his death. 

But it seems, according to "Wycol- 
lar, ' ' that the Lord Chief-Justice did not de- 
port himself with sufficient deference towards 
the Duke of Rutland and his sons, the Mar- 
quis of Granby and Lord Edward Manners, 



LORD COLERIDGE. 85 

in the trial of a lawsuit in which a humble 
subject of her Majesty was plaintiff and these 
noble gentlemen were defendants. There is 
such a charming naivete in "Wycollar's" 
way of telling the story, that I give it in his 
own words : 

" The plaintiff was a man who had served 
a term in prison for poaching, and of the 
professional agitator type, who used to make 
a practice of purposely taking up a position 
on the semi-public paths traversing the ducal 
estates, when shooting was in progress, with 
the express purpose of interfering with the 
sport and angering the sportsmen. He would 
often go so far as to gesticulate and shout wildly 
while the drive was in progress, so as to pre- 
vent the pheasants driven by the beaters 
from flying in the direction where the guns 
were ensconced. All this was tolerated by 
the Duke with the utmost patience, but when 
at length he added insulting language to his 
behavior to the Duke and to his guests, one 
of his Grace's gamekeepers took a hand and 
knocked the fellow down, with the result that 
a suit for damages was brought by the man 
against the Duke and his sons. Lord Cole- 



86 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

ridge, presumably with the intention of get- 
ting even with so recognized social leaders as 
the Duke of Rutland and Marquis of Granby, 
went out of his way to insult all three noble 
defendants during the trial, wound up by de- 
livering a charge most unduly biased against 
them, and in direct contradiction with all the 
established traditions and principles of the 
sporting world in England. Of course, this 
has not been forgotten of Lord Coleridge, 
and inasmuch as the English people are es- 
sentially a sporting race, it has added to the 
popular antipathy against the aged Judge, 
not only among the classes, but also the 
masses." 

This story presents as formidable an indict- 
ment of the noble defendants, and as thor- 
ough a vindication of Lord Coleridge, as it 
would be possible to make. 

This was only a year ago, " Wycollar " 
says. Early in this century, Sydney Smith, 
by his essays on the game laws, "raised the 
hair," so to speak, upon the backs of the 
noble dukes and their sons who used to set 
spring guns, and send their gamekeepers 
out to murder the half -starved peasants 



LORD COLERIDGE. ?>7 

who occasionally snared a rabbit. Now, a 
common man, standing in a public — " Wy- 
collar " says a " semi-public " — path, fright- 
ens some tame, hand-raised pheasants, so that 
instead of flying toward the place where the 
noble Duke and his sons were " ensconced," 
with their guns, the poor birds avoided 
the ambush. But he "gesticulated" and 
" shouted wildly," and talked back to his 
Grace, until his Grace's patience was worn 
out, whereupon his Grace ordered one of his 
lackeys to set upon and beat the offender and 
knock him down. Then some low-bred bar- 
rister, having the traditional courage of his 
profession, accepted a brief for the man who 
was thus beaten by the direction of the ' ' no- 
ble defendants," and the trial came on before 
Lord Coleridge and a jury. It was the duty 
of the judge to ignore the fact that the de- 
fendants were noble and the plaintiff ignoble, 
and to tell the jury, as the law of England 
has declared for centuries, that mere words 
or gestures that do not amount to an assault 
are no justification of an assault and battery. 
But the gravamen of Lord Coleridge's of- 
fense seems to have been that his charge, 



88 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

though accurately expressing the law, was 
' ' in direct contradiction with all the estab- 
lished traditions and principles of the sport- 
ing world in England ! " So it seems that 
the common law of England does not ac- 
cord with the traditions and principles of 
the sporting gentlemen of the ' ' club ' ' and 
"salon." Well, the noble Duke and his 
sons, the Marquis of Granby and Lord Man- 
ners, had better be looking up the abstracts 
of the titles they have. As men were said 
to be of more account than sheep and spar- 
rows in the days of Christ, it may be that a day 
is coming, and God speed it, when in England 
there will be some method for ' ' facilitating 
the descent of dullness ' ' to its proper level 
— a great lack now in English society, as 
Professor Huxley says — and when an in- 
herited and unmerited title will go for noth- 
ing. Sydney Smith once asked if a curate 
trampled upon did not suffer as great a pang 
as a bishop confuted. It may come to pass 
in England that even "the classes" and "the 
masses" will come to understand that knock- 
ing down one of her Majesty's subjects is 
as grave an offense as scaring a tame pheas- 



LORD COLERIDGE. 89 

ant beyond the range of an" ensconced " 
gun in the hands of a noble duke.* 

*Speaking of Lord Coleridge, in the reminiscences 
already mentioned, Lord Russell, the present Lord 
Chief-Justice, says : " Few~men, in his position, are 
without'enemies, and he was no exception to the gen- 
eral rule. For myself, I knew him as a kind, consider- 
ate and generous friend, steady in his friendships and 
probably constant also in his dislikes. There are many 
now living who have experienced kindness at his hands 
and who can recall, as I can, with gratitude, words of 
encouragement, spoken in times of doubt and difficulty. 
These count for much in the career of a barrister strug- 
gling to emerge from the unknown crowd. No one, 
however, will gainsay that by his death a great figure 
has passed away. He was intellectually, as he was 
physically, head and shoulders above the average of 
his contemporaries. He had a high sense of the dig- 
nity of his great office, and of its importance. For above 
twenty years he sat upon the judicial bench, and I be- 
lieve that during that long period he did honestly 
strive 'to do right to all manner of people, after the 
laws and usages of the realm, without fear or favor, af- 
fection or ill-will.' " 



90 RECOLLECTIONS OF 



CHAPTER Xin. 

In my conversations with Lord Coleridge and 
his guests I discovered a tone of depreciation 
in what they had to say of President Harri- 
son. This was an echo of the views of the 
so-called mugwump press. In the same way 
the members of the Reform Club — of which 
I was for a few years an unworthy member — 
are in the habit of belittling, or to use a milder 
phrase, patronizing men of the West, who, 
in public life, show ability of a high order. 
This habit they should set themselves to work 
to reform at once. Their judgments of men 
are happily reversed in most cases, and no 
serious harm is done in the long run. Sew- 
ard was, to men of this class, the only great 
statesman , and Lincoln an awkward , uncultured 
country lawyer, a sort of Cheap John politi- 
cian, and nothing more. McClellan was par 



LORD COLERIDGE. 91 

excellence the great military chieftain of the 
war. Grant was a dull fellow. Phil Sheri- 
dan was properly employed in buying mules 
for the quartermaster's department. Sherman 
was supposed to be insane because he dis- 
sented from Seward's opinion that the war 
was a "ninety days" affair, and had said that 
it would take quite a large force to keep the 
rebels out of Kentucky. And then Morton, 
and John Sherman, and Garfield, and Harri- 
son, bearing the bar sinister of Western birth, 
were second-rate men. So they wrote and 
talked in their little coteries in the East. But 
even the most pronounced mugwump, rising 
now from his salaams to the great statesman 
of Gray Gables, will admit that Lincoln was 
something of a man after all, and that Grant, 
and Sherman, and McPherson, and Logan, 
and Sheridan, handicapped as they were by 
reason of their obscure birth in the wild West, 
made tolerable figures as military leaders; 
that Senator Sherman, and Harrison, and 
Garfield did not appear at a disadvantage 
alongside of the later specimens of Eastern 
statesmanship, the Gormans, the Hills, the 
Murphys, the Quays, the Camerons, etid ge- 



92 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

niis omne. Lord Coleridge being much with 
these Eastern gentlemen when in this country 
in 1883, and reading copies of the Nation 
occasionally, had come to think that Harrison 
was a sort of " boy statesman," whose ad- 
ministration would be respectable and possi- 
bly able under the guidance of Mr. Blaine, 
who to the English mind stood as a sort of 
Premier to a figure-head President. To dis- 
abuse the mind of his Lordship I took occa- 
sion to send him my sketch of the life and 
public career of President Harrison, which 
was published in the New York Evening Post, 
December i, 1888, a few weeks after the 
presidential election. In response I received 
a letter dated January 10, 1892, from St. 
Lawrence-on-the-Sea, in Kent, where Lord 
Coleridge had gone for his Christmas vaca- 
tion. Among other things he said: 

" I thank you for the paper and for jour thought of 
me in sending it. I have read it with great interest, 
not only as being yours, but because it narrates and 
explains a career very noble and touching in itself, and 
it may be said impossible in England. There may 
have been examples in the times of the Commonwealth, 
perhaps, when Bishop Compton, Bishop of London, 
certainly had been a cavalry officer, but they were very 



LORD COLERIDGE, 93 

few. There were a few men who became eminent at 
our bar who left the army at the peace and disarma- 
ment after Waterloo, but that again was a very differ- 
ent sort of thing. They were little more than boys 
when they went on half paj-, and practically they lived 
the ordinary humdrum life of barristers ever after. 
With you it must have been more common, though 
such a character as you describe could be common no- 
where. I remember coming across a very interesting 
and powerful man in Ohio, who had served as a pri- 
vate, and was then (1883) one of the first men in his 
State, a Mr. Lincoln, I believe, no relation to the great 
President, but a man of very great vigor of mind and 
character. There were very good stories of his force 
and power told me, but all highly to his honor. It is 
a poor return for your paper, but I send you a hasty 
thing I had to write against time for the unveiling of 
Matthew Arnold's bust. It is really as much about 
Horace as Arnold, and in that view perhaps may interest 
you. I often think of our pleasant time together in the 
summer, and wish that it could have been prolonged 
or could be repeated. I should be glad to have shown 
you my Devonshire home merely as the sort of coun- 
trj' house, not large and splendid, but comfortable, 
which so many of us love so well. I was in one or 
two country houses in America, particularly at the 
town of Lenox, Mass., which seemed to me in itself 
and in its surroundings very beautifvil and liveable, if 
one may coin a word. That I did not see many more 
such I attribute to my own journeying being so much 
amongst the cities of America, which, indeed, with the 
people, were what I went to see. But I suppose they 
are at least rarer with you than with us, for I observe 
cultivated Americans always were pleased with them 



94 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

here and speak with regret of their comparative ab- 
sence in the States. I am here for our Christmas va- 
cation, which I am sorry to say ends to-morrow; in 
consequence of the serious illness of Lady Coleridge, 
She is very weak and exhausted, and I can not help 
feeling anxious about her. They say this corner of 
Kent is the purest air in England. It is splendid, no 
doubt, but Malvern, of which this piece of paper is a 
relic, is still more to my taste. We spent October 
there for the same reason. Lady Coleridge joins me 
in very kind regards, and I am always, < 
Yours very sincerely, 

Coleridge. 
Pray let me hear from you whenever you have time 
to spare for such a purpose. 

When President Harrison had completed 
his tour across the country and his speeches 
were collected, I sent Lord Coleridge a copy 
of the book containing them. His Lordship 
was much pleased, and, in a letter dated July 
2, 1892, he said: 

The speeches give me a very high idea of Mr. Har- 
rison. We know very little here of your politicians, 
and it is pleasant to be brought face to face with any 
one so manly and high-minded as Mr. Harrison shows 
himself in the book you have sent me. The perpetual 
demand which American customs make upon any one 
of the leaders of the parties in the way of speeches 
must be very trj'ing. In a degree (not within a thou- 
sand miles of the President) I found it so myself when 



LORD COLERIDGE. 95 

I was in America. But a private foreigner can say 
what he likes; a President, of course, must watch his 
words. 

It is hardly necessary to say that Harrison's 
administration fulfilled the expectations of his 
friends, and that before Lord Coleridge died 
he and other great men in England and else- 
where had occasion to modify their previous 
views concerning his ability as the chief ex- 
ecutive of a great nation. 

But Lord Coleridge loved the poets and 
loved to talk about them. This little ex- 
tract from the same letter gives a glimpse of 
that side of his character. Whittier had just 
died: 

I see you have lost a very noble old man in Whit- 
tier. A friend of mine in Philadelphia, who has many 
Quaker connections, introduced me to him many years 
ago and gave me all he had then written. It is a very 
pure, bright spirit we have lost in him, and his poetry, 
though perhaps not of the first order, was beautiful 
and inspiring, and a great deal of it will live. I have 
never been able to assimilate Walt Whitman, nor, even 
as one sometimes can, see what others admire in art or 
literature, though one can not agree in admiring one- 
self. I still think your best poet, by far, is Bryant, be- 
cause he is American. Longfellow might have been a 
Belgian, an Italian or an Englishman, just as well as 



g6 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

an American, except perhaps for his too greatly under- 
rated Hiawatha. But Whittier is, in his way, Ameri- 
can also, and has always for that, as well as for other 
reasons, strongly appealed to me. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 97 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Lord Coleridge entered Parliament as a 
member of the House of Commons when he 
was, as Lord Russell, his successor as Lord 
Chief-Justice, says, forty-seven years old. He 
was fairly successful as a political debater, but 
lacked the experience necessary for a leader 
in that body. Afterward he was a member 
of the Gladstone Cabinet, from which he was 
promoted to the Bench. His judicial career 
covered a period of twenty years. To the 
last he felt a lively interest in public affairs. 
In a letter written in the summer of 1892, 
from which I have already quoted, he says: 

You are just entering on a great contest; ours is 
just over, and has landed Gladstone once more in 
power. It is the fashion here to say that he will not 
keep it. He will not perhaps, for, wonderful though he 
is, he will be eighty-three complete in three months 

7 



98 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

more and he can not permanently suspend the laws of 
nature. But I hope and believe the party Avill keep to- 
gether long enough to extinguish the Unionists. I am 
out of politics (at least present politics), of course, but 
I would go far and do much to destroy the Unionists. 
To them and them alone is due coercion and all the 
train of evils and the denial of obvious and safe im- 
provements in England and Scotland. I have no feel- 
ing whatever against the Tories; there must be such 
people in every old established and aristocratic coun- 
try, and they at least are honest and act steadily on 
their principles. But a Unionist, who pretends to be 
and calls himself a Liberal, and who for seven long 
years has voted for everything reactionary and utterly 
opposed to his creed; I have no patience with these 
men. They were masters of the situation; they had 
only to say this and that must not be and it would not 
have been. But they lent themselves, in their blind 
hatred of Gladstone, to Balfour and his trade to hasten, 
nay, more than to hasten, all their worst Tory meas- 
ures, and the one thing I do gravely regret in the last 
election is that it has left them still mischievously 
strong. They can not stand alone, it is true, but forty- 
seven is more than I like to think of as a phalanx on 
the flank. 

This letter was written from the city of 
Gloucester, where Lord and Lady Coleridge 
were attending a musical festival, which was 
given in the cathedral. 

"There is something," he says, " apart 
from the acoustic properties of the building, 



LORD COLERIDGE. 99 

in the arches and grand roof, the stained 
glass, the height, the age of the building, 
which seems to increase the beauty and 
grandeur even of Mozart and Beethoven. 
The daughter of the bishop produced a piece 
of real merit, but a gentleman named Parry 
produced a work on the story of Job, which 
seems to me one of the very finest things an 
Englishman has done for many years. Per- 
haps you know Gloucester. It is a most in- 
teresting city, and the cathedral and its sur- 
roundings are grand and yet quiet and beauti- 
ful in no common degree. You are always 
sending me things, and it seems greedy to 
ask for more, but I did not get to Indiana 
when I was in America, and I have no clear 
idea of the country or its capital. Is there a 
photograph of your city? I should greatly 
value it if there is, and you would send it to 
me. When are you coming again? The 
sooner the better for your friends here. Next 
year, of course, the whole habitable globe 
will congregate upon the shores of Lake 
Michigan, and the year after is a long pros- 
pect for an old man. But I hope to meet 
you once more." 



loo RECOLLECTIONS OF 



CHAPTER XV. 

Though past three score and ten, it did not 
occur to me to think of Lord Coleridge as an 
old man. He wrote with the steadiness of a 
strong man, and an autographic note of his, 
written on the fly-leaf of a volume of Spenser 
which he presented to his cousin, Sophia 
Coleridge, on Good Friday, 1841, and which 
is now in my possession, is a fac-simile of his 
writing in the last letter I received from him 
last autumn. It is a great pleasure to have 
known a great man, great in his professional 
and judicial career — so gifted, so scholarly, 
such a lover of all good things in literature 
and music, and all these things adorning and 
strengthening, and not in the least impairing 
his efficiency as a great lawyer and a great 
judge. That he was both of these is the un- 
grudging testimony of the present Lord Chief- 



LORD COLERIDGE. loi 

Justice, whose article in the North American 
Review for September, 1894, is a worthy 
tribute to his predecessor. 

Lord Coleridge sacrificed to the muses as 
well as the graces, and never counted it a de- 
fect in the character of a good politician or a 
great lawyer that he loved poetry and music. 
When President of the Salt schools at Ship- 
ley, Yorkshire, an honorary title bestowed 
upon him, he delivered an address on "Edu- 
cation and Instruction." The address was 
delivered in June, 1893, just one year before 
his Lordship's death. At the risk of extend- 
ing this paper beyond a reasonable limit I 
will make a couple of extracts from this ad- 
dress, which maybe read with profit by young 
and old : 

Speaking as an old lawyer especially, I may say 
that few things compare in usefulness with a retentive, 
accurate memory. It is in youth that this faculty is 
formed and trained, and one of the best methods of 
strengthening it is the habit of learning by heart pas- 
sages we admire from authors, both in verse and prose. 
What we learn in youth we are apt to remember well; 
mental impressions at that period of life do not easily 
fade; and although they are easily received, they are 
indelibly retained; and if they are impressions of noble 
thoughts, clothed in noble language, we are laying up 



I02 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

a store of intellectual pleasure at one___eiid-Q£-Iife for 
enjo^^^ent3,t,-the other. Many of us live to grow old; 
if we do, our minds, if not ourselves, grow lonely; the 
interests of the world fade away, and the fashion and 
beauty of it vanisheth, and a time comes when we feel 
that: 

" 'Tis meet that we should pause a while 

Ere we put off this mortal coil. 

And in the stillness of old age 

Muse on our earthly pilgrimage." 
At such times the recollection of great thoughts, of 
lovely images, of musical words comes to us with a 
comfort, with an innocent pleasure which it is difficult 
to exaggerate. 

I will tell a story which came to me a few 
days ago, which illustrates the accuracy of 
Lord Coleridge's memory. At a banquet in 
New York, I think, some lawyer who had 
tried to cover or adorn his literary leanness 
by accumulating some scraps of poetry from 
a Cheap John collection, in his response to a 
toast, flung at the head of Lord Coleridge the 
oft-repeated words, "The shallow murmur, 
but the deep are dumb," which he attributed 
to Roscoe Conkling ! Lord Coleridge, in his 
talk, alluded to the matter and said that the 
words had been familiar to him from his 
youth, but that he had always been of the 



LORD COLERIDGE. 103 

impression, which was possibly erroneous, 
that Sir Walter Raleigh, and not Roscoe 
Conkling, was the author of them. But I 
proceed with the quotation from his address : 

And what should you learn? Speaking generally, 
the safest rule to follow is to learn that which pleases 
you best. I assume that it is not bad; but as to what 
is best, taste is very varied, and that which commends 
itself to one man perhaps repels another. My own 
taste you must take just for what it is worth, but 
(leaving out for obvious reasons all Greek and Latin 
writers) before and above every one (including them) 
I should myself place Shakspere; an inexhaustible 
storehouse of wisdom, instruction and exquisite dic- 
tion, indispensable to any one who has anything to do 
with speaking or writing. I knew well, I think many 
here must have known, a great advocate who was on 
the Northern Circuit, of whom it used to be said that 
perhaps he did not know much law, but he did know 
a good deal of Shakspere. And a great judge who 
knew both law and Shakspere said, when this was re- 
peated to him, that although in a lawyer, perhaps, a 
little law was desirable, yet if that could not be had, 
the next best thing to have was a knowledge of Shaks- 
pere. Next to Shakspere, I, for one, should put Mil- 
ton. Have any of you not heard the magnificent 
eloqence of John Bright.'' He told me himself that he 
was built on Milton, and if you heard him, nay, even 
if you read him, you can see that he is steeped in the 
spirit of this great poet, and that though he does not 
imitate Milton, he speaks after Milton. 



I04 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

All this must be very offensive to Hamlin 
Garland and his school, who join in say- 
ing to us that Shakspere, and Milton, and 
Scott, and Thackeray, and Dickens are back 
numbers. A year before Lord Coleridge de- 
livered his address I spoke to the graduating 
class of the Law School at DePauw University 
and tried to utter and make application, in a 
rather lame way, I confess, of one of the 
thoughts of Lord Coleridge : ' 'The drudging, 
dray-horse lawyer, who shows the marks of 
his office collar, who rarely allows himself a 
day off, who never has time to see a good 
play, who doesn't know the difference be- 
tween Yankee Doodle and a symphony of 
Beethoven's, who never witnessed a game of 
foot-ball or base-ball, who never killed a sal- 
mon, bass or trout or winged a mallard or can- 
vasback — how to be pitied is he ! It is abso- 
lutely distressing to have a distinguished legal 
friend look at you curiously Vifhen you quote an 
opinion of Buckle's, or Lecky's, or Huxley's, 
or Matthew Arnold's, or Spencer's, and ask 
you who Buckle, or Lecky, or Arnold, or 
Spencer is. A man who has not made him- 
self more or less familiar with the drift of 



LORD COLERIDGE. 105 

modern literature is preparing himself for a 
dull old age and is depriving himself of the 
best things that life affords. Sir Samuel 
Romilly pleaded with his professional breth- 
ren to devote all the time they could to polite 
literature; not simply for the pleasure it 
affords, but because it tended to make them 
better lawyers and more useful men. 'As soon 
as I found,' said Romilly, 'that I was to be a 
busy lawyer for life I resolved to keep up my 
habit of non-professional reading; for I had 
witnessed so much misery in the last years of 
many great lawyers whom I had known from 
their loss of all taste for books that I regarded 
their fate as my warning.' " 

There is a pathos in the concluding para- 
graph of Lord Coleridge's address that must 
touch every one. He was now in the last 
year of his long labors and useful life. He 
is speaking to the young students at Shipley 
and his words come with equal emphasis to 
the young everywhere. 

One word, if I may, to counsel you to live faith- 
fully and in earnest. Blessed are the pure in heart. 
It can never be too early to begin. The temptations 
of youth, of middle age, of old age; all life has its 



io6 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

temptations, all can be conquered. Do not believe 
those who tell you that such an achievement is impos- 
sible. It is perfectly possible, as many have proved. 
I can have no kind of reason to mislead you, and my 
age ought to give me, at least in this matter, some au- 
thority. Nothing will more help you to it, nothing 
will tend more to keep you from evil than the com- 
pany of good books and the thoughts and counsels of 
good men. They will fill you with good thoughts, and 
good thoughts bring forth good deeds, and good deeds 
are the only true happiness of life. 

I will end in the words of a great American poet, 
Bryant, written when he was very young, which I have 
known and admired — I wish I might say I had lived 
by — all my life: 

" So live that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan which moves 
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent Halls of Death, 
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, 
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him and lies down to pleasant dreams." 



LORD COLERIDGE. 107 



CHAPTER XVL 

Early in the spring of 1893 I engaged to 
write a notice of ex-President Harrison for 
the Appletons' new edition of their Cyclope- 
dia of American Biography, and, wishing to 
use a portion of one of his letters in which he 
had said some complimentary things of General 
Harrison, I wrote to Lord Coleridge for per- 
mission. In answer he wrote the following: 

I Sussex Square, W., 27th April, 1893. 
My Dear Mr. Fishback — I have not time to prop- 
erly answer your letter of the 13th, and shall not try. 
But I write a line at once to say that anything I have 
written (though I have quite forgotten what words I 
used) is very much at your service if you desire to use 
it. I have not the personal acquaintance of either Mr, 
Harrison or Mr. Cleveland, but they both seem to me, 
judging of their public speeches and acts only, to be 
men of high character and pure motive; and certainly 
the election seems to have been as fairly and honestly 
conducted as is reasonably possible. Of course, an 



io8 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Englishman must needs think the Republicans dead 
wrong in their political economy; but I don't expect 
that Mr. Cleveland will be able to do much in a coun- 
try so hopelessly protectionist, whatever he may hon- 
estly wish. 

The World's Fair will keep every American at home 
this year; next year, if we should be alive, Lady Cole- 
ridge and I reckon on seeing you, I will write about 
the arbitration later on. I attended a session of it in 
Paris, and was profoundly impressed with the ability 
of the counsel, the great dignity and fairness of the 
tribunal, and (last, not least) the princely manner in 
which the French republic was conducting itself to- 
ward every one connected with the arbitration. 
Yours very sincerely, 

Coleridge. 

Mr. Cleveland's wishes concerning tariff 
reform and financial legislation have certainly 
been frustrated by the antics of the "wild 
horses" of his party. The good Sir Thomas 
Browne tells us it is not wise to fish for whales 
in the Euxine sea, and when Mr. Cleveland or 
any other President expects to do great things 
for the cause of reform in any of its phases 
by means of such an aggregation of ignorance 
and inexperience, to say nothing worse, as 
controlled the Democratic majority in the last 
Congress, he expects too much. Mr. Cleve- 
land mounted the box, assumed the reins and 



LORD COLERIDGE. 109 

started his new Congress off in extra session 
at a lively pace, after giving it a fillip with 
his anti-silver-purchase message. But his 
leaders balked, and it was only by the aid of 
some hard-pulling Republicans that the repeal 
bill became a law. In October, 1893, Lord 
Coleridge said in a letter to me : 

I have hardly heard much from you since Mr. 
Cleveland's election. Both the candidates, to a for- 
eigner, seem to have the merit of high character and 
principles; but to an Englishman the leading lines of 
Mr. Cleveland's policy appear to be those which a 
great country ought to move along, and especially on 
the silver question he seems to be clearly in the right. 
I know many clever men who are bimetallists, but I 
have never been able to comprehend how that policy 
can be supported, except by giving an artificial value to 
one of the precious metals, and then it is only another 
form of inconvertible paper and so it will never work. 
Of course, gold does alter somewhat, but returns show 
that gold has varied so little for near one hundred years 
that it is practically fixed in value, and if so, there 
seems to be an end of the question. 

In the same letter from which I have just 
quoted, Lord Coleridge said: 

I do not like the look of things on this side of the 
water, and although I do rejoice over the success of 
the arbitration between the two countries, I have never 



no RECOLLECTIONS OF 

troubled myself as to the details of the controversy, but 
I rejoice in the example set by two very powerful na- 
tions, and I hope it may spread, though I suppose a 
great military monarch, and, above all, a nation like 
France, will never arbitrate. I believe we do quite as 
unprincipled and high-handed things as the French do, 
but we do them with less swagger and less outward 
contempt for the opinion of the world. Apart from the 
arbitration, I believe we are not going on very well. 
Gladstone is a marvel, and perhaps the greatest in our 
parliamentary history, but the laws of nature can not 
be permanently suspended in favor of any one, and I 
think he himself is showing the truth of what he said 
himself now nearly twenty years ago, that " it doesn't 
do," as he phrased it, to serve with an octogenarian 
Prime Minister. He told me both Lord Russell and 
Palmerston had remained ministers too long, and I think 
he is showing it now. -s^ * * I have been much 
struck, and I confess very much surprised, at the quiet 
with which the escapade of the House of Lords (in 
throwing out the home-rule bill) has been received. To 
me it seems outrageous, but I do not think the people 
care much about it — perhaps it has given them even a 
new lease of a life, which Lord Salisbury's insolence 
seemed to have and ought to have endangered. 

We are just starting for London to recommence 
another legal year. I should not wonder if it was the 
last. Your letter interested me, as your letters always 
do, and made me hope that some time before I go 
hence, we may meet again and have some more talk 
together. I often think of our pleasant times together, 
and wish that they might recur. 



LORD COLERIDGE. iii 



CHAPTER XVn. 

The premonition that he was entering upon 
his last year was a true one. This letter was 
the last one I had from him. His official la- 
bors, his attendance at the House of Lords, 
and the social demands of the London sea- 
son broke him down. And then he was de- 
pressed by the loss of three of his life-long 
and intimate friends, Matthew Arnold, Pro- 
fessor Jowett, master of Balliol College, and 
Cardinal Newman. How he loved Newman 
may be gathered from a passage in an ad- 
dress which he delivered to the Institutes Un- 
ion of Birmingham, on April 25, 1890, a copy 
of which he sent me after I left England. 
' 'Thinking for Ourselves" was his theme. He 
said : ' ' We are sent here by God with a 
mind as well as a body, and it is our plain 
duty to make the best we can of both of them. 
* * The time will come when we 'shall per- 



112 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

ceive' — I use the words of a great living 
writer — ' that there are but two beings in the 
whole universe — our own soul and the God 
who made it. Sublime, unlooked-for doctrine, 
yet most true. To every one of us there are 
but two beings in the whole world, himself 
and God, for as to this outward scene, its 
pleasures and pursuits, its honors and cares, 
its contrivances, its personages, its kingdoms, 
its multitude of busy slaves, what are they to 
us? Nothing; no more than a show. Even 
those near and dear, our friends and kinsfolk, 
whom we do right to love, they can not get 
at our souls or enter into our thoughts, so 
that even they vanish before the clear vision 
we have, first, of our existence, next of the 
presence of the great God in us and over us 
as our governor and judge, who dwells in us 
by our conscience, which is His representa- 
tive.' You will easily guess where those 
words come from. Raffaelle is said to have 
thanked God that he lived in the days of 
Michael Angelo ; there are scores of men I 
know, there are hundreds and thousands I 
believe, who thank God that they have lived 
in the days of John Henry Newman." I 



LORD COLERIDGE. 113 

think it a fitting close to these hastily written 
recollections to link together the names of 
these three friends — Arnold, Newman and 
Coleridge — and to quote a passage from Mr. 
Arnold's address delivered in this country on 
Emerson. He began it as follows: 

"Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at 
Oxford, voices were in the air there which haunt my 
memory still. Happy the man who in that suscepti- 
ble season of youth hears such voices! They are a 
possession to him forever. No such voices as those 
which we heard in our youth at Oxford are sounding 
there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more 
knowledge, more light, but such voices as those of our 
youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal New- 
man is a great name in imagination still; his genius 
and his style are still things of power. But he is over 
eighty years old; he is in the oratory at Bii-mingham; 
he has adopted for the doubts and difficulties which 
beset men's minds to-day a solution which, to speak 
frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he was in the 
verj' prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Ox- 
ford; he was preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every 
Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew 
what was for us the most national and rational institu- 
tion in the world, the Church of England. Who could 
resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in 
the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, 
rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing 
of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts 
which were a religious music, subtle, sweet, mournful.? 



114 LORD COLERIDGE. 

I seem to hear him still saying, "After the fever of life, 
after wearinesses and sicknesses, fightings and despond- 
ings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeed- 
ing; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, 
unhealthy state — at length comes death; at length the 
white throne of God, at length the beatific vision." 

Verily, these three were lovely and pleasant 
in their lives, and together I doubt not they 
are enjoying the beatific vision. 



APPENDIX. 



LORD COLERIDGE ON MATTHEW 
ARNOLD. 

From the London Times of November 2, 1891. 
A BUST of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold by 
Mr. Bruce Joy, the sculptor of the Bright 
statue recently erected at Manchester, was 
unveiled by Lord Coleridge on Saturday in 
the Baptistery of Westminster Abbey. Be- 
fore the ceremony a large number of the 
friends and admirers of the man filled to over- 
flowing the Jerusalem Chamber, among them 
being many members of the Arnold family. 
Besides the Dean of Westminster and Lord 
and Lady Coleridge, there were present Mrs. 
Matthew Arnold and Miss Arnold, Mrs. W. 
E. Forster, Mr. R. Arnold, Mr. Edwin Ar- 
nold, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Arnold, General 
and Mrs. Benson, Mr. and Mrs. Whitridge, 
the Hon. Armine Woodhouse, Mr, Oakley 
(117) 



ii8 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

Arnold-Forster, Mr. W. Wood, Mr. A. Wood, 
Mr. and Mrs, J. Cropper, Mrs. Edward Wing- 
field, Constance Marchioness of Lothian, the 
Earl and Countess of Pembroke, the Dow- 
ager Lady Stanley of Alderley, Lord Han- 
nen, Lord Shand, Lord Hobhouse, Lord and 
Lady Sandford, Mr. John Morley, M. P. ; 
Mr. Osborne Morgan, M. P. ; Mr. Cyril 
Flower, M. P. ; Sir C. Butt, Sir G. F. Bowen, 
Mr. Lyulph Stanley, Mrs. Farrar, Mr. Ham- 
ilton Aide, Mr. George Russell (honorary 
Secretary of the Memorial Committee), Canon 
Duckworth, Canon Ronsell, the Rev. Dr. Al- 
ton, the Rev. R. J. Simpson, and Mr. Bruce 
Joy. 

The Dean of Westminster said : As one 
on whom the responsibility of adding to the 
memorials in the Abbey that of one whose 
name is dear to many here, I maybe allowed 
to say one or two words. The responsibility 
is often a perilous and an anxious one. In 
this case I have accepted it; I discharge it 
with the advice and help of those who are 
better qualified than myself to judge, and I 
have decided cheerfully and unhesitatingly. 
I may say at once that I felt the danger of 



LORD COLERIDGE. 119 

my being biased by my long intercourse and 
intimacy — dating back to the time when I 
was a new boy at Rugby — with Matthew Ar- 
nold. I do not care to dwell on the close- 
ness of that intimacy when we were boys, but 
this I may say — that as years went by, though 
our paths in life and our occupations were 
different, to say nothing of our gifts, — and I 
would not venture for a moment to compare 
myself with him — yet year by year I learnt to 
form an increasingly higher idea of his gifts 
and his genius as a poet. I am sure that it 
is not merely as an early friend, not merely 
from the thought of what I feel would be the 
judgment of my dear and illustrious predeces- 
sor, that I rejoice in thinking that in that se- 
questered, yet most interesting corner of this 
great fabric, some memorial will be placed 
of him whom so many of us join in honoring. 
I feel confident, so far as we may speak at 
present, that future generations will not for- 
get the works of one who has painted, though 
in the colors of his own age, the eternal 
thoughts and emotions of the human spirit, in 
such stately rhythm as appealed to so many 
of the highest feelings of the heart. I can not 



I20 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

for a moment think that the author of the 
' ' Scholar Gipsy, " of " Thyrsis, ' ' of " Rugby 
Chapel," of the " Good Shepherd Carrying 
the Kid," — and how many more could I add? 
— will be neglected by thoughtful men among 
generations to come. I must not detain you 
long. You have come here to listen to one 
who, himself the inheritor of a great poetic 
name, would have been listened to more than 
half a century ago as he will be listened to 
to-day. In what circle of his contemporaries 
is he not listened to ? But if I may add one 
incident, one reminiscence that this bright 
autumnal day has brought to my mind, I 
think it might interest some here . Nearly fifty- 
two years ago, on a visit to his father's home 
among the lakes and mountains of Westmore- 
land, from my own father's home, which lay 
in what is now a crowded suburb of London, 
I was one of the youngest of a group who 
walked from Fox How by Rydal, calling at the 
Mount by Grasmere, and home again on the 
other side of the lake. The group was com- 
posed of men and boys who were just on the 
threshold of opening manhood. We were led 
by Thomas Arnold, who sleeps in Rugby 



LORD COLERIDGE. 121 

Chapel, by William Wordsworth, whose 
grave is among his own mountains, and by 
Frederick Faber, who lies not far off from 
what was then wooded and almost rural Sy- 
denham, Of the young men — five or six of 
them who were in the group — I am almost the 
only survivor, and I remember well the beauty 
and majesty of the day and some of the con- 
versation, both light and serious, of those 
with whom we walked. Strange we should 
have thought it then, if we could have looked 
far into the future, that perhaps the frailest of 
those young members of the party should 
live to see placed here, by the memorials of 
William Wordsworth, Keble, and Charles 
Kingsley, in a corner of the Abbey whose 
dim light is broken by the hues of a window 
placed to recall the memory of George Her- 
bert, the bright and jocund friend who that 
day walked by his side. I will now ask to do 
honor to his memory one of the very fore- 
most of a group of those scholars of Balliol — 
over which a cloud of anxiety and distress is 
now rising — one of the very foremost of a 
group of whom only two survive, and of 
whom Matthew Arnold was the youngest — a 



122 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

group portrayed in such touching colors by 
J. C. Shairp, when he said, " I have never 
found nor expect to find a more high-hearted 
brotherhood." 

Lord Coleridge said : I hope no one will 
think, because I have yielded to a request 
which I could not, without discourtesy, refuse, 
that I suppose myself equal to appreciating 
the genius or properly delineating the char- 
acter of Matthew Arnold. It is because of 
the difficulty of the task, and from my earn- 
est desire not to say one word that shall be 
hasty or unbecoming, that I follow the ex- 
ample of a great man, Mr. Lowell, who read 
in the Chapter-house of Westminster what he 
had to say when he unveiled the bust of Cole- 
ridge in Westminster Abbey, I have, indeed, 
already tried to say, in print, what I felt about 
my honored friend ; but I can not suppose 
that any of you have read it, or, if you have, 
that you remember it ; and yet to say it over 
again would be to one man at least very dull 
and dreary work. Yet if I say nothing new, 
what I say shall, I hope, at least be true, and 
if it is not, as it can not be worthy of his 
genius, it may at least bear witness to the 



LORD COLERIDGE. 123 

depth and sincerity of the affection with which 
he inspired his friends. We may revive with 
the dews of love the fading flowers of memory 
and twine them into a wreath for hope to wear. 
In the year 1829 or 1830, I am not sure 
which, a bright little fellow was put upon a 
table in a room full of people at Laleham, 
and recited with intelligence and effect Mr. 
Burke's magnificent description of Hyder 
All's ferocious desolation of the Carnatic; in 
the year 1888 that bright boy, not one whit 
less bright, scarcely one whit less youthful, 
for the sixty years which had rolled away, was 
laid to sleep in Laleham church-yard, almost 
within earshot of the room, which still re- 
mains, and which one who was there can 
never think of except as illuminated with 
that bright figure, that sunny face. Of him, 
more than of most men, it was true, as Dry- 
den says, that men are but children of a 
larger growth, or, as Wordsworth puts it still 
more profoundly, the child is father of the 
man. His was above all things a consistent 
life — ^what he was at school, what he was at 
college, and till the last moment of his life; 
the loyal son grew naturally into the loving 



124 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

father, the affections of his youth strength- 
ened and deepened into the husband's stead- 
fast love ; the clever, original, perhaps way- 
w^ard, student and scholar became with no 
external change the penetrating, delicate, 
strong, yet subtle critic, the refined, the pa- 
thetic, the philosophic, the great poet. Enough 
has been said elsewhere of his uneventful yet 
most interesting life ; of the gradual fashion 
in which he overcame the sneers, the preju- 
dices, the flippant judgments of men whose 
words have long since ceased to influence, if 
they ever influenced, the opinion of men of 
cultivated, reflecting, independent minds, who 
think for themselves, and who determine in 
the last resort and without appeal the perma- 
nent place of an author in the goodly fellow- 
ship of his equals or superiors. It is, per- 
haps, too soon in the case of Matthew Arnold 
for a private man to speak with confidence as 
to his final and conclusive judgment. Criti- 
cisms upon him, which to my apprehension 
are altogether beside the mark, have appeared 
in publications of some temporary authority, 
but which have no lasting effect upon an au- 
thor's fame. Lord Jeffery did his best to 



LORD COLERIDGE. 125 

crush Wordsworth; he injured, for a time, 
the sale of his poems, but he has not affected 
his fame in the slightest degree — he has only 
manifested his own hopeless incompetence. 
The Quarterly Review — I may guess, but I 
have no right to name, the author — attacked, 
with brutal insolence, the dying Keats and 
the youthful Tennyson. The Quarterly Re- 
viewer is forgotten; but what Englishman 
questions the greatness of Tennyson or Keats ? 
In Arnold's case much that has been said will 
be soon forgotten; that he will be soon for- 
gotten every one even moderately acquainted 
with him will confidently deny. I am well 
aware that my own opinion is worth nothing, 
but to-day and here I take the freedom to say 
that in a combination of great qualities he 
stands alone in his generation. Thackeray 
may have written more pungent social satire, 
Tennyson may be a greater poet, John Mor- 
ley may be a greater critical biographer, 
Cardinal Newman may have a more splendid 
style, Lightfoot, or Ellicott, or Jowett may 
be greater ecclesiastical scholars and have 
done more for the interpretation of St. Paul. 
But for a union of the satirist, the poet, the 



126 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

delineator of character, the wielder of an ad- 
mirable style, the striver after the eternal 
truths of Scripture and religion, he is, in my 
judgment, not only first, but he is unique. 
Calling back with the inexactitude of haste 
the great names of literature, there is one 
man between whom and Matthew Arnold I 
seem to see a curious likeness — a very great 
man — a man not, I think, the greatest, but 
the most read and the oftenest quoted of all 
Latin authors ; I mean Horace, Horace wrote 
nothing without meter — nothing, at least, that 
has survived ; but he wrote in two styles — he 
was a great lyric poet, and he wrote satires 
and epistles in hexameters, it is true, but, ex- 
cept in a few bursts of noble language, his 
hexameters were, as he said, hardly distin- 
guishable from prose itself. As a satirist he 
has been beautifully described by a successor 
purer than himself, but, when we can under- 
stand him, almost as gracious and refined. 

" Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico 
Tangit ; et admissus circum prsecordia ludit, 
Callidus excusso populum suspendere naso." 

— Persius. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 127 

"And jet arch Horace, while he strove to mend, 
Probed all the foibles of his smiling friend. 
Played lightly round and round the peccant part, 
And won, unfelt, an entrance to his heart ; 
Well skilled the follies of the crowd to trace 
And sneer with gay good humor in his face." 

—Gifford. 

This, surely, might almost pass for a de- 
scription of much of Matthew Arnold's play- 
ful, well-bred, humorous satire — satire, nev- 
ertheless, severe and incisive, piercing to the 
very quick the vulgarity, the insolence, the 
ignorance of much which in England assumes 
to be society, and powerful with the strength 
of knowledge and the force of truth. I do 
not know any other author who holds the 
mirror up to English nature so steadily as he, 
and yet always with an air of benign, com- 
placent pity, infinitely irritating, no doubt, 
but infinitely amusing. But there was an- 
other side to both these men, a side, perhaps, 
too little recognized, certainly too little dwelt 
upon. I waive the discussion whether Hor- 
ace was the greatest lyrical writer whom 
Rome produced. When I think of Catullus 
I am glad to waive it. But I think that late- 
ly there has been a disposition to underrate 



128 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

and, like Lord Byron, "to understand, not 
feel, his lyric flow"; to forget the splendor 
of some of the odes and the exquisite pictur- 
esque grace of others, the ode on Cleopatra 
and the one to Maecenas, " Tyrrhena regum 
progenies," in one class, and thirty or forty 
lovely little poems in the other. Let that 
pass. In lyric poetry certainly both hold a 
place all but the highest; and there is one 
quality not perhaps so commonly observed 
in which they are strikingly alike — in melan- 
choly. The melancholy of Matthew Arnold 
was noted long since by Principal Shairp : 

"Full of young strength, so blithe and debonair, 
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, 
Or half in dreams, chaunting with jaunty air, 
Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger ; 
We meet the banter sparkling in his prose. 
But knew not that ground tone his songs disclose, 
The calm which is not calm, but agony." 

The melancholy of Horace was noted by Ar- 
nold himself, and was one strong reason for 
the love he felt for him. He was asked what 
he thought the most beautiful and character- 
istic passage in Horace, and he answered at 
once: 



LORD COLERIDGE. 129 

" Linquenda tellus, et domus, et placens 
Uxor; neque harum, quas colis, arborum, 
Te, prseter invisas cupressos, 

Ulla brevem dominum sequetur."* 

I can not translate off-hand, and Francis is 
detestable. Another passage I know was his 
especial favorite, not only for its exquisite 
music, but for its profound sadness : 

" Damna tamen celeres reparant cselestia Lunse: 

Nos, ubi decidimus 
Qu6 pius ^neas, qu6 Tullus dives, et Ancus, 

Pulvis et umbra sumus. 
Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernEe crastina summse 

Tempora Di superi ? 
Cuncta manus avidas fugient heredis, amico 

Qu32 dederis animo. 
Cum semel occideris, et de te splendida Minos 

Fecerit arbitria ; 
Non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te 

Restituet pietas." f 



*Mr. Gladstone translates : 

Earth, home, and winsome wife, thy fate 
Will have thee leave ; and not one tree 
Of all, save cypress that we hate, 
O transient lord, shall follow thee. 

— Carm. it: I4 

fMr. Gladstone translates : 

The hastening moons all waste in heaven repair 

We, when we once descend 
To Tullus, Ancus, sire ..^neas, there 
In dust and shadow end. 



130 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

There is another matter in which they sympa- 
thized entirely — the love of the country. Fit 
to adorn and fond of adorning those chosen 
companies which were fortunate enough to 
secure his presence, Matthew Arnold lived 
habitually, quite as much by choice as by 
necessity, away from London, and even when 
he took for a time a London house, he would 
go down from time to time for a day into the 
country, simply to refresh himself with a sight 
of his dogs, his birds, his trees, his flowers, 
and all those sights of fields and sky which 
he needed to revive his spirits and keep his 
mind in tune. In this he was human, natural, 
simple, and, let me add, like Horace, who 
has been described by a great poet in Ian- 



Will the gods grant a morrow for to-daj ? 

No mortal can declare ; 
Give ! all thou giv'st with open hand away 

Escapes thy greedy heir. 

Once thou art dead, once Minos on his bench 

Thy doom for thee hath writ, 
Birth, eloquence, devotion, nought can wrench 

Thy spirit from the pit. 

—Carm. iv: 7. 



LORD COLERIDGE. 131 

guage, much of which might be applied to 
him whom we have met this day to honor. 

" That life— the flowery path that winds by stealth— 
Which Horace needed for his spirits' health ; 
Sighed for, in heart and genius, overcome 
By noise and strife, and questions wearisome, 
And the vain splendors of Imperial Rome! — 
Let easy mirth his social hours inspire, 
And fiction animate his sportive lyre. 
Attuned to verse that, crowning light Distress 
With garlands, cheats her into happiness ; 
Give "me" the humblest note of those sad strains 
Drawn forth by pressure of his gilded chains. 
As a chance sun-beam from his memory fell 
Upon the Sabine farm he loved so well; 
Or when the prattle of Bandusia's spring 
Haunted his ear— he only listening- 
He, proud to please, above all rivals, fit 
To win the palm of gaiety and wit. 
He, doubt not, with involuntary dread, 
Shrinking from each new favor to be shed, 
By the world's Ruler, on his honored head!" 

But there is one matter, at least, in which 
the superiority of the younger author is un- 
questioned and unquestionable. No word, 
no thought in Matthew Arnold is unworthy 
of the austere, religious beauty of the great 
Abbey in which for centuries his countenance, 
preserved to us by f^ne art, will be enshrined 



132 RECOLLECTIONS OF 

and where his memory will enjoy such im- 
mortality as is possible on earth. Horace 
had examples before him which in this mat- 
ter he did not follow. Arnold had exam- 
ples, also, of a different sort before him, from 
whom he shrunk with disgust and scorn. No 
nobler nature, no purer mind, no loftier char- 
acter has it been in a long life my good for- 
tune to know. Envy, jealousy, meanness 
were unknown to him ; they withered in his 
presence. His writings were but a revelation 
of himself — now playful, now serious, always 
aiming at making the world better and man- 
kind happier. And, now, to unveil his like- 
ness and leave him among the graves and 
monuments of England's greatest men in that 
magnificent church of which it may be said 
that they dreamt not of a perishable home 
who thus could build. Let your own memo- 
ries pay a nobler tribute to Matthew Arnold 
than his oldest friend has been able to ren- 
der. 

The company then went to the Baptistery, 
where, on the invitation of the Dean, the 
bust was unveiled by Lord Coleridge. It is 



LORD COLERIDGE. 133 

considered an admirable likeness. As the 
Baptistery is a place which is rather hidden 
away by some gigantic monuments and may 
easily escape the notice of the visitor to a place 
where there are so many things to attract at- 
tention, it may be well to mention that it is 
to be found immediately on the right of the 
west door. It is a little square nook which 
one would never think had anything in it, 
but within is a statue of Wordsworth, for 
which no room could be found in Poets' Cor- 
ner, and which, perhaps, not one in a hun- 
dred of the visitors to the Abbey has ever 
seen, and there are also a medallion of Pro- 
fessor Fawcett with allegorical figures, and 
busts of Keble, Charles Kingsley, and Fred- 
erick Denison Maurice. The bust of Mat- 
thew Arnold, which, like the other busts, is 
of pure Carrara marble, stands between those 
of Kingsley and Maurice, and right opposite 
to that of Keble. The most suitable time 
for seeing the bust is from i to 2 o'clock. 



The following extract is from * The Peerage, 
Baronetage and Knightage of the British Em- 
pire. By Joseph Foster. 

John Duke Coleridge, Baron Coleridge, 
of Ottery St. Mary, Devon, in the Peerage 
of the United Kingdom, so created January 
lo, 1874, Privy Councilor, Chief-Justice of 
the common pleas June, 1873, barrister-at- 
law M. T. 1847, Queen's Counsel 1861 ; 
Recorder of Portsmouth 1855-65, Solicitor 
General 1868-71, Attorney General 1871-73, 
member of Parliament for Exeter 1865-73, 
Lord Chief-Justice 1880; born December 3, 
1820; died June 14, 1894. 

Arms. — Arg. on a mount vert in base an otter ppr. 
a chief gu. charged with a dove of the field between 
two crosses pattee fitch^e or. 

Crest. — On a mount vert therefrom issuing ears 
of wheat ppr. in front of a cross gu. an otter also ppr. 

Supporters. — Dexter, an otter ppr. Sinister, a 
lion &a. each accolled with a garland of roses ppr. 

Motto. — Time Deum cole regem. 

Seat,— Heath's Court Otterj St. Mary. 

Town House. — i, Sussex Square, W. 



*Printed and published for the compiler by Nichols 
Sons, Westminster. 

(134) 



FAC-SIMILE OF 

A LETTER FROM LORD COLERIDGE 

TO W. P. FISHBACK, ESQ. 







X^^^-^^^^^-^^y JylL.'-^ ^ ^-^ 






^D 






Z"^^^^-*-" ^^^^-^--'^^^-^ 




/^r^ SC^^-^^— ^ ^ . 



Hon. Richard PV. Thompson's 



RECOLLECTIONS 



FROM WASHINGTON TO LINCOLN, 



Including the Administrations of Sixteen 
Presidents of the U. S. 

•r -i- 

*' It was a happy thought of the friends of Col. Thompson who sug- 
gested that he should crown the labors of a long and illustrious 
career by writing his 'Personal Recollections.' There is a note of 
distinction in the work which will preserve it for many generations, 
and matce the fame of its author as permanent as the Nation whose 
annals it recounts. In perusing the pages the reader is amazed at 
the stores of information of its author, at his retentive and serviceable 
memory, and at the copiousness and elegance of his diction. The 
author has the great merit of giving, in the two handsome volumes, 
in clear outline, sketches of the great men and great events in the 
political history of the Nation for a period of si.xty years."— Indianapo- 
lis Journal, 



PRICES OF VARIOUS BINDINGS 

2 Vols., 8vo., Buckram, $6.00 
a Vols., 8vo., Half Calf, $9.00 
2 Vols., 8vo., Half Leather, $8.00 
2 Vols., 8vo.,^ Full Leather, $12.00 

+ .J. 

PUBLISHED BY 

THE BOWEN=nERRILL COflPANY, 

Indianapolis and Kansas City, U. S. A. 




PI r. riley^s books 

Published by The Bowen=nerrill Co. 

ARMAZINDY. (Just published.) 

NEGHBORLY POEMS. SKETCHES IN PROSE. 

AFTERWHILES. PIPES O" PAN. 

RHYMES OF CHILDHOOD. 

THE FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT. 

GREEN FIELDS AND RUNNING BROOKS. 

Above eight volumes in uniform bindings sold separately or in sets, 
per volume, lamo, cloth, $1.25; half calf, $2.50; full morocco, $5.00. 

AN OLD SWEETHEART OF MINE. 

Illustrated, colored plates; full gilt, $2.50. 
OLD FASHIONED ROSES. 

(Published in England.) i6mo, cloth, $1.75. 
POEMS HERE AT HOME. 

(Published in New Yori<.) r2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

THE BOWEN-HERRILL COflPANY, 

INDIANAPOLIS AND KANSAS CITY, U. S. A. 

For sale by all booksellers, or v.'ill be sent by the publishers post- 
age prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada or Mexico, on 
receipt of the price. 



